phpBB Bots are a B****

Rowena Ravenclaw · Jun 7, 2015

I'm not sure if this is the right location to post this, but I"m going to try anyway.

I use phpBB as a platform for my self-hosted site. The site itself was given to us by two former friends who we had a falling out with, apparently they'd taken a dislike to the site and decided to hand it over. We took it, vamped it into something else, and as long as we keep the donations up they're willing to let us keep using the forum.

Now here's where the question comes in. We have a lot of bots in our "Who Is Online" list, often so many that it's difficult to tell what genuine guests are looking at and who the genuine guests are.

Does anyone know of a mod or some way to hide the bots in this area to make it easier to see what our genuine guests are looking at/what they might be discussing in our cbox?

Shriker · Jun 7, 2015

It's been a while since I modded phpBB, but I'm pretty sure that it has a manage bots section in their admin cp. You could define more bots that way (similar to how Baidu and Google's bot is already defined), and potentially filter them out of the who is online list that way (or at least give them names so you know they aren't valid visitors).

Alternatively, since you're self-hosted, you can try blocking a few friendly rule-abiding bots using a robots.txt file. This won't stop the malicious, spammy, content/link harvesting bots though. Even then some bots will choose not to listen to a robots.txt file on a subdomain. :(

Ultimately the only surefire way, and even it isn't bulletproof, would be to IP ban known bots from your site altogether. I do this sometimes to bots that are taking too much bandwidth from RPGfix at times when they're being malicious and not adhering to my request throttling. Usually bots have multiple IP addresses though, so it's really more of a temporary solution.

Rowena Ravenclaw · Jun 7, 2015

I haven't seen anything in the admin cp, and it's a lot of bots that are undefined, it's hard to determine who is a bot and who isn't for the most part. I'll look into some of the other methods you've suggested though and see what works. It's very frustrating seeking 12 bots and 3 guests all look like guests.

Shriker · Jun 7, 2015

Oh, totally. It's a real pain! I think I imported a list of bots that people had already found/defined when I was using phpBB (I might have bulk imported them via the database backend). Pretty sure there was a link to Bots/Spiders in the quick access portion of the ACP... but yeah, totally a huge pain to add each one in manually. Specially when you don't know who actually is a bot or not. :(

Rowena Ravenclaw · Jun 7, 2015

Thus the big problem. I mean, it's not as if it's a major deal, guests will ask questions when they have them, but it's nice to know where guests spend a lot of time so that I can tailor information accordingly. And to know if we have legitimate guests wandering around (my co-admin and I are cursed to the point a guest asks a question the minute we walk away from the computer).

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phpBB Bots are a B****

Rowena Ravenclaw Resident Game Owner

Shriker Shadowlack Owner RPGfix Admin Patron Game Owner

Rowena Ravenclaw Resident Game Owner

Shriker Shadowlack Owner RPGfix Admin Patron Game Owner

Rowena Ravenclaw Resident Game Owner

feedback needed for phpbb forum