Very high user profile views

support
1

One of my Discourse sites that attracts about 40 logged-on users a day is seeing spikes of > 500 user profile views on some days.

I’ve used the Dataexplorer plugin to work out that most are from a single IP: 23.237.4.26 which does not appear to be from a registered user.

SELECT
  user_profile_views.ip_address,
  COUNT(user_profile_views.ip_address)
FROM user_profile_views
WHERE viewed_at > '3/24/2018'
GROUP BY user_profile_views.ip_address
ORDER BY COUNT(user_profile_views.ip_address) DESC

I’m aware of the prior posts on this subject but the Topics are all closed.

Anyone still seeing this? Any thoughts?

I have taken action and now set this setting:

hide user profiles from public

 Disable user cards, user profiles and user directory for anonymous users.

To checked.

Any more advice would be appreciated.

2

Can you check your HTTP request logs to see what the user-agent is for the request?

3

Yep, indeed, on doing this:

root@blah-app:/var/log/nginx# grep '23.237.4.26' access.log.1

I discovered many instances of this:

AlphaBot/3.2; +http://alphaseobot.com/bot.html

Found this:

http://www.theinternetofbots.com/list-of-bots/alphabot.html

A bot for collecting data for SEO reports?

So I guess harmless?

3 Likes
4

Good news! @neil is working on a feature that lets you block badly behaved bots. Should be ready by end of week.

9 Likes
5

what is the issue associated with the above? if you don’t mind explaining it :smiley:

6

Search your site setting for “blacklisted crawler” and add unique user agent strings as you see fit.

1 Like