XF 1.5 Spam bots eating bandwidth and skewing visitor figures

[ak38]

Hey guys,

First apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

I noticed a spike in forum activity this week, at first I was ecstatic thinking that finally we were gaining traction then I looked into it and noticed that most of the activity is from what look like spam bots.

For example I click an IP and get something like this: hydrogen013.a.ahrefs.com
we get ALOT with the hydrogen prefix, 90% of our "visitors" are spam bots or whatever they are originating from this source.
I've got 7 bot visitors from hydrogen IPs at the moment. They aren't posting possibly due to the spam protection that xenforo offers but they are still a pain as they eat up my limited bandwidth and resources.

I'm sure many of you guys have come up against this problem, how do you deal with/block this activity?

Thanks

 

[051119]

One thing that I have done is add a custom user field that is required to be completed at registration; this asks something that is related to the forum, and I have input a regular expression to require the users to be checked. I use Stopforumspam to check all Usernames, Email addresses and IP addresses; these accounts when registering have to be manually approved. If the Email address and Username doesn't look suspicious on the Admin new account approval screen I then check the value of this field to ensure it makes sense, before approving it.

 

[AndyB]

I suggest using this add-on:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/robots.3900/

 

[ak38]

@051119 I don't have any problems with spam registration, only spam traffic/visitors, but thanks for stopping by.

Thanks @AndyB will check it out now!