XF 2.0 Hydrogen?

[JoyFreak]

I see a lot of this hydrogen website on my forums, what is it? Is it a robot? Or a normal person?

 

[Ozzy47]

It's pretty much a bad bot.

 

[Brad Padgett]

It's a bot that tends to get on my nerves too. It's common to see them.

 

[Ozzy47]

You can block the whole OVH subnet if you don’t get legitimate traffic from it.

 

[JoyFreak]

Will it do harm?

Can someone explain what bots actually do? I thought they just list things on search engines?

 

[Ozzy47]

Possibly, either it is a spam bot or a WP vulnerability search spider.

Bots can do many things, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

 

[JoyFreak]

Okay, well how do I know if they are bad or not? I haven't had any visible/physical issues with it?

 

[Ozzy47]

OVH bots are either spam bots or WP vulnerability search spiders, so they are bad. As for any other bots you spot, look them up, a simple internet search is usually good enough.

 

[JoyFreak]

OVH bots are either spam bots or WP vulnerability search spiders, so they are bad. As for any other bots you spot, look them up, a simple internet search is usually good enough.

But I haven't had anyone register and spam my forums. Also I do not own a WP (i'm assuming word press) so that does not apply to me?

But say I wanted to stop that bot from coming on my forums, how is this done via robots.txt?

 

[Ozzy47]

No, you would not block it by robot.txt, it is most likely a not that ignores that, only good bots pay any attention to the robots.txt.

Best way to block bad bots is by blocking their IP's or IP range at the server level.

 

[JoyFreak]

I have added The Ultimate htaccess Blacklist to my .htaccess found here:
https://perishablepress.com/ultimate-htaccess-blacklist/

This was recommended by my host. They also said OVH is hosting company.

I am going to monitor my site and see how I get on with this list. Hopefully it stops all the bad bots or the majority at least!

 

[Bryan]

The ahrefs bot respects robots.txt

You can block it via robots.txt

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

 

[JoyFreak]

Well I have added the blacklist. It may stop them but if they continue to come on my site, I will add your suggestion Bryan, thanks.

I just wanted to know are these IP's bad?
54.36.148.141 (ip141.ip-54-36-148.eu)

As there seems to be a few on my site. They are OVH but according to my host, they are a hosting company.

 

[Bryan]

You will always get visits from all kinds of different servers for a variety of reasons, if they are not hammering, scraping or brute forcing then I'd just ignore them, it could become an endless task.

 

[JoyFreak]

How do you know if they are hammering, scraping or brute forcing?

 

[Bryan]

Hammering is when they are sending multiple requests per second (your host will usually have something in place for this)

Scrapers are hard to spot unless they are hammering but if the same IP is on your site all day viewing different content every few seconds then it may be scraping.

I'm pretty sure xenforo has built in brute force protection and any others such as htaccess passwords etc should be covered by your host through modsec.

 

[JoyFreak]

Well I think that IP (54.36.148.141 (ip141.ip-54-36-148.eu)) as seen in the screenshot are scraping or no? They seem to be getting an error but I think it's due to the restrict guest views add-on.

 

[Bryan]

If guests can't view the content then there's nothing to scrape

 

[JoyFreak]

So what do scrapers generally do that's harmful then?

 

[Bryan]

Steal your content and pass it off as their own.