We had something similar going on with our site too starting several years back, something that appeared out of the ordinary. It wasn't people interested in our writings, it was BOTs and scammers harvesting our content, uploading our originally authored content to their sites for reproduction.Okay. Then it looks like my writings are interesting to people.
We keep tightening the screws down on our site's security to prevent these data mining thieves. However, it seems that once they get a taste of your site's content, they keep attempting to acquire more of it; pictures and informative topics. Only a few of these guests end up registering, but not posting. They're not interested in adding to discussions. I think they're just probing for something else or verifying that our site's information is still accessible in other ways.
Lately, most arrive as A.I. BOTs, jumping from forum to forum looking for content they can take, probably because machines are more efficient thieves. We made the decision to just block most every country the thieves were coming at us from via .htaccess, using country code blocks mostly, but also IP blocks for granularity within countries we don't want blocked.
It's almost weird when you notice that post view counts return to normal. On the site log side of things though, our 403 page counts have since gone ballistic. They're all just computer BOTs poking away, looking for ways to break back in.
Statistics: Posted by SQLnovice — Thu Jan 23, 2025 4:23 pm