Forum/IP question, pretty important

[Bahamut2000X]

Well at the forum I am staff at (it's a VB forum by the way) we have suddenly gained about 40+ guests with all the same IP doing many many actions all at once including some of which are for registired users only (playing in the arcade, PMing) and I'm wondering if anyone has some technical idea of what exactlys going on.

[crono_logical]

Do they all happen to be of the form 64.68.87.*? We seem to be plagued by them here too, they're a search engine spider from I think Yahoo. I'm not sure how to get rid of them (I suspect maybe placing a robots.txt file somewhere in the root folder of the site with specific info which I'm still trying to find out), but Bleys nicely banned that IP address range here, so I expect all they're seing is the You're Banned page or something whenever it tries to crawl these forums :p

If the IP isn't of that form, it'd be interesting to know what it is though, it still sounds very much like a search engine spider crawling your site for stuff to put in it's database ro something :p

[Bahamut2000X]

Well the IP form j.inktomisearch.com although numbers belong after that first J.

Also coincidently it seems to also be in the mod panal (and it's not a mod, all the staff currently on is in a chat talking and we confirmed it ain't any of us)

[Dr Unne]

Do you want to just block the IP or something? Look up how to use .htaccess files maybe. You can prevent them from seeing your site at all.

[Bahamut2000X]

I seem to be the onyl one on the staff that wants to ban that IP. Although most of the rest think it's better to know who exactly he is for who knows why. Many are convinced it's a hacker (although since he's doing stuff guests and normal members can't do I'm thinking it might possible be a hacker)

EDIT: I should also mention that the person is no longer doing mod stuff according to the who's online list.

[Lionx]

*whacks B2X* i want him banned and you know it.

This has been happening since the beginning of the day, do you have any idea what this thing can do to u? I mean what can it do to damage us?

[Endless]

http://www.inktomi.com/ might be the responsible for B2K, while Google is the one running here,
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html might be the solution in both cases.

[Citizen Bleys]

Yeah, bots often show up as accessing the moderator and admin control panels because they recursively search each subdirectory. What they're actually seeing is the same thing anybody sees if they try to go to www.eyesonff.com/admin/ -- which is to say, a login screen ;)

The bots are harmless, I just started banning IP ranges to be safe.

[crono_logical]

Cheers for the links, Raf :p

Maybe I should make a robots.txt file for EoFF to stop search engines browsing through the forums, if only to make the Who's Online page cleaner and reduce the server load, and get Spatvark or someone to upload it :p

[Citizen Bleys]

Sounds like a plan.

I'm always available for uploading, too.