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Optimize Server Or Block Spambots

Optimize Server or Block Spambots

I believe I have found one very BIG solution to server usage, well in fact four. One of the reasons I have been troubled over server usage was because I thought it was all the scripts I had, but it's not that... It's spam bots! If you have been tweaking your my.cnf and your php.ini and your httpd.conf hoping to get server performance only to see that you need to keep restarting your server then here may be the secret solution you have been looking for:

1. Stop spam bots from taking up your bandwidth. You can do this through a .htaccess block on certain domains / IPs. You can also set up security checks to ensure that these bots that may be running scripts and injections are not constantly attempting to post rubbish on your sites. You will be amazed that spam bots may actually be 80-90% of the 'guests' that you see in [Who's Online] within your Forum.

2. Stop lower search engine bots from checking out every single link. You can block those through the same method in #1. Really you only need the major search engines to pass through your turf, not the whole crowd.

3. Make sure you default pages are fast loading. In other words when someone cannot find anything or the spam bots are caught then make sure to lead them to a fast page, not a page that loads intense amounts of scripts. I think this is key for people that administer communities as sometimes the default pages of these communities lead them to lots of queries.

4. Make sure your interactive scripts and databases are at optimal performance. Of course I can dedicate an entire page or several pages to that, but that is another issue. I would dare say that numbers 1,2, and 3 are the most critical since no one creates a script or database to fail, generally everyone writes good code and it can just be tweaked after wards.

Spambots Block Server Optimize

Ever Found The Site A Bit Slow?

Its not the scripts or over usage its because of this same issue: spam bots trying to 'break' input pages so they can post their spam. When they can't they attempt to use up the server's CPU thus causing everything to move slow. I've recently taken the measure to block whole countries where this happens.

While it may limit a few genuine users from these countries it also saves our server resources. Considering most of our input comes from English speaking countries and a few from Europe it isn't worth keeping it open for the whole world. If anyone has issues please do use the Feel free to send me details via our Contact Page or Reply here (Assuming you are using a proxy to read this) and I will get back to you.