ExtortionLetterInfo Forums

ELI Forums => Getty Images Letter Forum => Topic started by: lucia on December 01, 2011, 10:31:45 AM

Title: Re: ELI Website Traffic Statistics Trivia
Post by: lucia on December 01, 2011, 10:31:45 AM
Daniel--
Zbblock http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php will help block robo-spammers registering.  It's pretty easy to use but I know some people are uncomfortable editing php or ftping to their hosts and I don't know you well enough to know where you sit on the continuum of dealing with software.  If you need help ask me. (I know I'm new here, but I can still help on that.)

 I recently installed zbblock at my blog precisely because the load from crawlers has been exploding. Oddly, in Oct/Nov I spent time trying to figure out how to auto-detect and bounce lots of these guys and created a side-blog containing about 3 posts discussing a few things. I was planning to discuss that more.

I think we might also need to figure out some way to help people bounce any nuisance bots that draw our sites bandwidth for their purposes. This includes things like picscout; web rumors suggest getty uses that for crawling.
Title: Re: Re: ELI Website Traffic Statistics Trivia
Post by: Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi) on December 01, 2011, 11:33:07 AM
They are not rumors Getty Images purchased picscout a while back.
Title: Re: Re: ELI Website Traffic Statistics Trivia
Post by: lucia on December 01, 2011, 01:55:14 PM
Do you know if it's true that picscouts IP is associated with deny from bezeqint.net?  I've added "deny bezeqint.net" to my .htaccess block for now.  That might be over-inclusive, but I'll be looking for more.

Oddly, I'd been on a mission to block or bounce bandwidth, memory, cpu hogging crawlers in Oct/Nov.  Even apart from the Getty issue it sounds like picscout falls in that category.
Title: Re: Re: ELI Website Traffic Statistics Trivia
Post by: Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi) on December 01, 2011, 02:35:33 PM
Not sure, but I wouldn't say it's over inclusive, I have blocked every IP that originates in Israel.