Very high user profile views

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around a Discourse site experiencing unusually high user profile views, with most coming from a single IP address (23.237.4.26) not associated with a registered user. merefield used the Dataexplorer plugin to identify the issue and initially suspected malicious activity. However, upon further investigation, including checking HTTP request logs, merefield discovered that the traffic was generated by the AlphaBot/3.2, a bot used for collecting data for SEO reports, which appears to be harmless.

codinghorror suggested checking the user-agent in the HTTP request logs to determine the cause of the issue. Later, codinghorror mentioned that a feature to block badly behaved bots is being developed and will be available soon. codinghorror also provided a temporary solution, recommending adding unique user agent strings to the “blacklisted crawler” site setting to block unwanted traffic.

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?

4

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

5

What’s the issue 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.