Stop the TopSites spam!

**Kayla** · June 15th, 2007, 7:21 PM

Thanks to posts from panache, I went a little deeper into the current TopSites issue (the influx of Turkish IPs) and found this great article. Please read it and also make sure to upgrade TopSites to the newest version! We are still disabling older versions of TopSites on our servers because it is impossible to show everyone this thread, unfortunately.

http://www.jimwestergren.com/stop-the-topsites-spam

Quote:

I finally moved the site to another hosting I have in which I pay $150 monthly for (15 C-class IPs, unlimited accounts etc). But then I got an urgent mail from the hosting support. It was found that topdirectories.info is using up all the CPU of the server and it has to be stopped rapidly or they would suspend. I was surprised and decided to check it out. I found out that it was not using very much bandwidth, the traffic was average like 200-300 daily uniques and the size of the database was not a problem.
I went into Webalizer and this is what I see:

Over 24K hits per hour!

They are collecting hundreds of buttons of Topsites and then probably have some bots that reloads that page thousands of times a day and also click on all the buttons to get better ranking on the topsites. These are from Aardvark Topsites but also other ones and the spammers are mainly from turkey using words such as “sohbet”. And for each reload button.php get’s executed and in that file are SQL queries that gets the correct numbers to display on the button. Imagine 20 thousand reloads of button.php each hour and the amount of CPU work …
So I wanted to ban these spammers in the .htaccess and found an excellent resource: Block hitbots with .htaccess

Thanks Jim.

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