RANDOM comments

[Sandy]

Seems it's to big, the max measurements are 100 by 100 on their site, strange thing is I'm using the same avatar as here..

[Sandy]

Maybe it was just a random thing, but I noticed yesterday the site I have linked here got 7 guests yesterday, yet the other site with no links anywhere got 15 guests, quite likely a random event that doesn't happen often, usually it's the other way round.. All the permissions are similar, or were, maybe a few extra bots visited than usual on the site that's not visited, no way of telling unfortunately, I just get guests showing, not whether they were people or bots.. A pity MyBB doesn't list the bots that visit sites, it'd be interesting to know whether we're getting both or just one, getting bots is good I guess, at least it helps get our sites out there in searches..

[Skyon Archer]

MyBB is able to list names of Bots on Online List. I don't know about your setup with the free provider, but to show specific bots, this is how you would do it on MyBB:

AdminCP > Configuration > Left hand side Spiders / Bots > Add new bot

This section allows you to manage the search engine spiders & bots automatically detected by your forum. You're also able to see when a particular bot last visited.

You should have some bots specified already. For instance, here at Planet Nexus, we list:

Bing, Baidu, Google, Yandex, Facebook, Twitter, Applebot, DuckDuckGo, Discord, Alexa Internet, Ask.com, Internet Archive, Checkhost, Pingdom and UptimeRobot

[Sandy]

I'll take a look shortly, I'm just online for the day now, and it's sunday, I sould be having a lie in, no reason to stay in bed these days.. :(

[Sandy]

Banning
Custom Profile Fields
Word Filters
MyCode
Languages
Plugins
Moderator Tools
Calendars
Warning System
Thread Prefixes
Security Questions
Report Reasons

That's the list on the left, it looks like it may have been dropped.. :(

[Skyon Archer]

Yes, it should be between:

Moderator Tools
>>> Spiders / Bots
Calendars

Well. Back to the old story of "you get what you pay for"

[Sandy]

Nope, maybe I'm either not on the latest version or it's been removed, a pity really, it'd be handy knowing what bots have been on.. I have done a Google search for my sites in the past and found them in the top 5 search results, so I could do the same again if I feel like it, or lose the link again, done that a few times..

[Skyon Archer]

Your forum provider is using the latest version of MyBB available.

However, they have most likely modified the core files for their service.

Removing the tracking of bots reduces server resource usage. It eliminates need for back-and-forth between the browser and the server; specifically the MySQL/database interaction.

[Sandy]

So having bot tracing could possibly cause a form of DDoS attack?

[Skyon Archer]

Bot tracking, no. Bots themselves, yes. A person can write a malicious bot that hits your site so much it uses up all the site's resources.

-------------

Here's your situation.

The provider is hosting 5,034 amount of forums (as advertised on their website). On average, a MyBB forum conducts an average of 40,000 SQL queries a day.

The 40,000 is based off of the MyBB forum here at Planet Nexus

Note: there are around 60 queries on the index page, 80 on the forum listing page and 80 to 110 on the thread listing.

So, that would be an average of 200,000,000 (two hundred million) requests being handled a day for all of the forums they are hosting.

Now, say each of those requests have a payload of 1 kilobyte each, that would equal to 200 Gigabytes of data being transferred between the server and the forum.

That 200 GB does not include any of the other stuff being served by their server like the forums code itself, images, scripts, attachments, etc.

Nonetheless, if you owned that company and could turn off the tracking of bots on the online users list, you could reduce hundreds of SQL queries! That means a lot of data transfer savings!!

As such, it's only common sense for them to cut out things that happen on the server, like database queries.

Hope this makes sense to you.