[Forum] Absolutely sick of bots

[Arsh]

I have insane number of bots (atleast that's what I think they are) lurking on my forum all the time. Usually around 2000 at any given time. They origin from few select countries that I have no users from. Not only they make us look bad (fake numbers on "Who's Online?"), they also eat up 1GB of bandwidth each month.

I have a pretty strong anti-spammer registration process. My guess is that these bots come to my forums, try to register but fail and then just stick around hoping for an entrance. This is my theory anyway!

I have added IP ranges from these countries in my .htaccess file. That didn't work. I blocked all but few spiders in my robot.txt. Hopefully, both of these files make sense cos I downloaded the content from the internet. I'm absolutely lost at what to do next.

Any ideas what I might try?

Thanks

[Arsh]

Thankfully, Google Analytics isn't showing these bots so I can have real stats about my forum.

[Trevor Hannant]

Have you spoken to your host about blocking these at a server level?

[melbo]

What are you using that can give you stats on bot bandwidth vs legitimate traffic bandwidth? I'd be interested in seeing those numbers for my site.

1 GB seems like an enormous amount of bandwidth consumed by doing nothing but viewing register.php

[Alfa1]

There are many scraper bots on vbulletin forums. They put servers under pressure and eat a lot of bandwidth. They sell your content or post it to websites that are plastered with adds. They make good money while you pay the bandwidth bill.

I wonder what IB does about this on their sites.

[Jacob_ITAPros]

I block certain countries from accessing my site by adding large blocks of ip ranges to htaccess.

[Arsh]

Have you spoken to your host about blocking these at a server level?

Yes, they suggested that I block specific countries. So I got a .htaccess file from http://www.blockacountry.com/ and uploaded it but that didn't help me.

Also, I get a DB error everytime I try to access my /forums/online.php? page

[Arsh]

What are you using that can give you stats on bot bandwidth vs legitimate traffic bandwidth? I'd be interested in seeing those numbers for my site.

1 GB seems like an enormous amount of bandwidth consumed by doing nothing but viewing register.php

I went to cpanel for my website, looked at the bandwidth consumed by visitors from each country. Visitors from Germany, Russia and Czech consume about 1GB of my bandwidth together. I don't have any members from those countries and I'm not even targeting members from those sites. So I can only assume that I'm only getting unwanted attention from those countries.

[Arsh]

I block certain countries from accessing my site by adding large blocks of ip ranges to htaccess.

Can you tell me how you do that? I got a .htaccess file from blockacountry.com but it doesn't seem to be doing it's job.