There are currently 5830 users online. 141 members and 5689 guests

[Ole Anderson]

Wow! What amazes me is that of the total, only 141 are members. Is that just paying members? How can there be so many visitors that just stop by? I guess most just choose to not become involved.

And today we had the most ever online!!!

[Greg R Bradley]

I think that what you are seeing is that most people would only logon if they need to see an attachment or to reply, like I just did.

[Bert Kemp]

Yea all these guest come ask questions and we the members and contributors give them all the answers they need and then poof there gone till the next time they need help.
I think if your looking for help you should be come a contributor. Gessh its a whooping 6 bucks.

[Ian Moone]

Web Bots - little web spider programs that crawl around the web gathering info and sending it back to home base.

I might view a thread here a couple times about a certain machine lets say.

All the next week my google feed of adverts will be for that machine - because I showed an interest in it!. Likewise if I just go to youtube - without entering a specific search - the vids "recommended for me to watch" will be how to's and reviews etc for that machine!

Thats how your web activity is tracked... the sad thing is MOST of the bandwidth the forum host has to pay for, in order to afford 150 member the benefit of visiting is web bots making someone else money at the forum hosts expense with web bots / web spiders!

Ones that seek out and save transmit email addresses - these get sold for marketing companys to spam your email box.

You CAN ban them from the forum by their ISP numbers.. but its a lot of work to do manually for admin / and mods... and the RISK is that if say you try and ban a range of ISP addresses that many of these bots come from, there only has to be one member who's ISP falls within that range of numbers and they are automatically banned also.

Consider web bots like aids or herpes... they just spread and infect computer and forums after forum if your not 100% fastidious about keeping them out and when you do keep them out some of them are bots that feed search engines so suddenly traffic to your forum drops off etc.

Just a heads up.

Ohh the good side of bots?

You can claim them as unique visitors when selling advertising space to your advertisers! "Advertise with us, we get 5830 users online.

every day!".

Thats gotta make an advertiser pay up big compared to we get 150 members a day!

Just the price of doing business in today's internet world.

[Scott Shepherd]

With 97,000 + members, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there are 1000's and 1000's of members reading from work, most probably don't have it remembering their login credentials while at work. I view the forum from multiple sources, one logs in automatically, the rest don't.

It's WAY more than 141 real people on this forum at any given time.

[Keith Outten]

Its true we do have a lot of visitors here every day but today we are experiencing a major attack from web bots. By tonight we should have at least some of their IP addresses blocked so it shouldn't be as bad tomorrow.

FWIW web bots cannot get to anyones email address here, they are all hidden.
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[Randy Red Bemont]

Thanks for all the behind the scene work. It is appreciated.

Red

[Bert Kemp]

Thank You Keith and Mods you guys do a fantastic job. I thought the site was a little slow today now I understand why.
Block those Bots, push em back way back go team

[ken masoumi]

Thank You Keith and Mods you guys do a fantastic job. I thought the site was a little slow today now I understand why.
Block those Bots, push em back way back go team

+1 on the good job by the mods, I also find SMC slower than usual today.

FWIW web bots cannot get to anyones email address here, they are all hidden.
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I don't know how these web bots gather info but they do have easy access to our first and last names.

[Ian Moone]

You can block them but they just come back in a new series of ISP numbers when the data stops flowing back to home base. Probably programmed to do that automatically.

Need a automated bot blocker or something?

All I get is Asian single women's adverts on the bottom of the pages here... I guess the lad has been surfing porn sites on my PC again!

[Brian Hale]

... I guess the lad has been surfing porn sites on my PC again!

I'm having a tough time letting that one slip by without comment . . . .

[Gary Gill]

Yea all these guest come ask questions and we the members and contributors give them all the answers they need and then poof there gone till the next time they need help.
I think if your looking for help you should be come a contributor. Gessh its a whooping 6 bucks.

I didn't realize how easy it is to contribute. I don't post much but I read daily. Easily worth a contribution. Thanks to all that make this site so great.

[Frederick Skelly]

I didn't realize how easy it is to contribute. I don't post much but I read daily. Easily worth a contribution. Thanks to all that make this site so great.

Thanks for helping Gary!

[Steve Wurster]

Its true we do have a lot of visitors here every day but today we are experiencing a major attack from web bots. By tonight we should have at least some of their IP addresses blocked so it shouldn't be as bad tomorrow.

FWIW web bots cannot get to anyones email address here, they are all hidden.
.

An increase in bots might be due to a recently patched flaw in vBulletin. Perhaps the bots are trying to exploit the site in case it hasn't been patched.

[Keith Outten]

Ian, if you see an advertising banner at the bottom of the page here it isn't from SawMill Creek. We don't host banners at the bottom of any pages.

Aaron wrote a bot detector that he thinks will help fend off the bots, at least for now. There is an upgrade to vBulletin that we haven't installed, Aaron has decided to wait until he has the new server ready before he upgrades vBulletin.
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