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Unusually many requests to join and sign-in pages | Forum

Topic location: Forum home » Support » General Questions

Daniel Jun 27 '13

While checking my server logs recently I have noticed that the domain on which I host my Oxwall site generates unusually high amounts of traffic. My Oxwall site is very small, it has about 30 members of which about a handful will be active on any given day, and just a bit of forums discussion and image sharing going on. Yet last month, the domain has registered over 3 GB in transfer.

On further inspection I have seen that a disproportionate amount of this traffic is generated by requests to the join page (/join) and login overlay (/base/user/ajax-sign-in/). The public landing page (/) only follows in a distant third place. The join page is less than 31 kB in size, but with 35,000 requests in one month, it alone amounted for over 1 GB of traffic. That exceeds even what the photo sharing on the site generates.

It's too little traffic to be an attack, and it doesn't look like bots either. Most of the hits register as Windows machines with either Firefox or Chrome as user agent. There is no one source, although it seems that very many requests come from France, while most members of the site are from Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. I also get almost no search engine referrals at all.

Because this all seems a little strange, I wonder whether there is some redirection bug or something that could be causing this many requests. Has anyone else ever noticed something similar on their Oxwall site?

The Forum post is edited by Daniel Jun 27 '13

Oxwall Accessories Jun 28 '13

It is most likely the spam bots... If its not something that bothers you then just sit back and enjoy the stats. I had a site up where this was happening and I just kinda let the bots go at it. Log in 6 months later and Im now ranked as a pr2 site. I can deal with that. lol

Daniel Jun 28 '13

Right, the spam bots! Suddenly it makes sense that they're hammering the join page, haha. I used to get about a dozen spam accounts in my approval queue per week. Since the upgrade with the Watchdog plugin, I haven't had a single one, so I kind of forgot about them entirely. The plugin seems to do its job well!

I'm not too bothered with the traffic, it's still relatively little after all. The only thing I thought about was that if my site became more popular and those requests grew with it proportionally, my host might not be too happy.

Stephen Feb 8 '15

I am experiencing the same problem with a new installation. The join page traffic started pretty much the day after the installation before I even let anyone know about the site. It can't see how that could be a spam bot that quickly. It was also a newly registered domain so how was it picked up but a spam bot.

The Forum post is edited by Stephen Feb 8 '15

Daniel Apr 27 '15

Could your domain have been registered by someone else previously? You can check by querying it at DomainTools or who.is, or maybe see if the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has archived some other site that used to have the same address. Also, if it's a domain name using common words, it might have been pinged using just dictionary searches. Once the domain is out there somewhere, or is likely to be tried randomly, spambots will have already been probing it.

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Unusually many requests to join and sign-in pages | Forum