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Website activity

 
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roger.pape
Site Admin


Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Sun May 04, 2014 10:04 am    Post subject: Website activity Reply with quote

As part of maintaining a website, one is provided with software to monitor and analyze the activity on the website. This is particularly useful for spotting and banning spammers. It also gives one an idea as to what is most frequently viewed on the site.

Month after month. the most frequently downloaded files are those of the various county marriage records, Johnson County in particular, followed by Lafayette Co., Saline Co., and Jackson Co. The next most popular files are those of Brunetti's Tombstone Inscriptions. Other frequently accessed files are Loberta Runge's and Gary Frerking's Frerking Family History and the church records of St. Paul's and St. John. The message board articles generally attract some attention when they are first posted and occasionally when they are later discovered by someone.

It is encouraging to know that there is some interest in what has been posted on-line and that the efforts in maintaining the website have some value. The one thing that surprised me is the continual downloading of the marriage records from this site. I don't know if it is the same people repeated searching these records or if there is that much interest from many different people. I would like to believe that it is the latter. If one downloads these files, they can be saved on a local computer without the need to re-download them. Fortunately, the interface to the server is not overtaxed and hopefully it will remain so.
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roger.pape
Site Admin


Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 10:58 am    Post subject: Abuse of the Robots Reply with quote

One of the chores of maintaining a website is to minimize unwanted accesses to the site. A large portion of the activity on the Internet is a result of robot software or spiders. As explained in an earlier posting (Registration problems), I had originally attempted to block all robot accesses to this website. However, some of the search engine robots (like googlebot) perform a useful service by indexing the website so that people who are not aware of the site can find a particular name or subject posted on it. These spiders are well-behaved and efficiently scan the contents of a website only periodically. However, there are hundreds (probably thousands) of robots used by spammers/hackers to promote their wares. They are billed as “marketing tools”, trying to scrape up as many e-mail addresses as possible to bombard people with e-mails. Some of them honor the blocks placed in a website's robot.txt file but many others simply ignore the blocking.

Recently, a particular robot (namely semrush.bot) was bombarding this website. It appears that it first discovered the site in April 2016. While I had put a block on it in the robots.txt file, the hits and file accesses kept increasing until the latter part of December when it was continuously reading files on the site from a number of URLs (46.229.168.65 – 46.229.168.75). Despite filing reports of abuse, the activity continued. Fortunately, there are other ways to block accesses, so the attack was finally stopped.

I was impressed with the way the website host handled the attack and the site continued to function. Hopefully, none of the other viewers were inconvenienced.
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