To all of the SC football fans in China, Russia, Ukraine,...
Posted: Tue May 14, 2013 11:27 pm
In late April I noticed an up-tick in our pageview count, at the rate we were growing I was sure that we would have to upgrade to a paid hosting plan in May. The free membership here on Forumatic allows up to 30,000 pageviews a month, a rate of about 1000 per day which is indicated with the dashed red line.
![Image](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38827137/Pageviews_30%20April.png)
Then I noticed something odd at the bottom of the Index page: Most users ever online was 74 on Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:07 am
Huh? 74 online at 2:07 am? I started paying attention to all of the guests that were viewing the site, I started checking their IP addresses. I quickly discovered that a large portion of our traffic was coming from foreign websites. I found that there are multiple websites out there dedicated to tracking, reporting and blocking these scans from spammers and data harvesters. I started banning individual IP addresses, but quickly realized that another computer in the same range would be along shortly. I started banning entire blocks of ISP addresses once I was sure they were somewhere overseas and were associated with known spammers and harvesters.
So, if you are in China, Russia, Ukraine, France, Indonesia,....and you can't view this site, I apologize. But it looks like we won't have to upgrade our membership just yet. I just checked the count and we're again running between 400-500 hits per day.
![Image](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38827137/Pageviews_10%20May.png)
![Image](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38827137/Pageviews_30%20April.png)
Then I noticed something odd at the bottom of the Index page: Most users ever online was 74 on Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:07 am
Huh? 74 online at 2:07 am? I started paying attention to all of the guests that were viewing the site, I started checking their IP addresses. I quickly discovered that a large portion of our traffic was coming from foreign websites. I found that there are multiple websites out there dedicated to tracking, reporting and blocking these scans from spammers and data harvesters. I started banning individual IP addresses, but quickly realized that another computer in the same range would be along shortly. I started banning entire blocks of ISP addresses once I was sure they were somewhere overseas and were associated with known spammers and harvesters.
So, if you are in China, Russia, Ukraine, France, Indonesia,....and you can't view this site, I apologize. But it looks like we won't have to upgrade our membership just yet. I just checked the count and we're again running between 400-500 hits per day.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
![Image](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38827137/Pageviews_10%20May.png)