What's the deal with "robots"

[hotcacpl]

We host five sites on our VPS. All our forum sites. Even with no "members" logged onto any of the forums, it's not uncommon for hundreds of visitors to show up on each forum at any given moment. I know these CANNOT be real people and are probably robots. Are they hogging site bandwidth and resources? And what in general would they be doing?

Thanks

[Ulatan]

that's usually common with PHPbb and vbulletin sites, there should be a setting on when to reset who's online or it could be a glitch keeping the sessions open for very long.

You could also try a test to see if it's the forum software or if it's actual bots. Visit www.loadimpact.com and put in your forums address. You should get 800+ hits on your forums within a few minutes, and you can see how long it takes for the who's online to revert back to a lower number.

[Lobes06]

This is not unusual at all. I have a very small phpBB3 forum for our HOA association, and it gets hammered all the time, mostly from bots trying to register and either A) post spam, or B) simply create an account so that they can put their URL in their profile.

I have a small php script that runs and logs all visitors, so I can add the offending IP ranges (I usually ban large IP ranges at a time, especially the ones that come from Asia and Eastern Europe, since they have no reason to be on my site anyway) to my .htaccess file.

Its a never-ending battle however.

With the latest phpBB3 release, fewer of them are actually successful in posting or creating accounts, although once in a while one gets through.