Quick tip, you can add bots to other groups. Create a group called bad bot and ad the bot, set permissions to never for everything.User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /
Thanks for the robots.text line.thecoalman wrote: ↑Sun Sep 20, 2020 5:01 amQuick tip, you can add bots to other groups. Create a group called bad bot and ad the bot, set permissions to never for everything.
Block this bot. if you take a deep look at all of your site's traffic you will find many many more to block too. From one of our other posts the other dayRandom American wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:03 pm On a board I'm an Admin on, we keep on getting visited by something called the AhrefsBot.
It has the following agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)
Have you guys had any visits from this bot, and would you say its a good bot or a bad one? I find it interesting that it shows up as a Guest and it is active pretty much constantly. It now shows up in the online list as more than one user, so I worry if it's going to cause problems.
Edit: My apologies if this is in the wrong forum.
Having been at PHPBB for over 15 years now - best thing we recommend to remember is there is not a single magic bullet to resolve malicious activity against your board. Most board owners are not fully aware of the tremendous amount of activity on/against their sites (even smaller boards) that offers absolutely no benefit to the board owner. This activity ranges from script kiddies to well funded entities who's sole purpose is to enrich themselves off of your efforts.
Protecting your board is like a really big onion. You have to have many many layers of protection and you need to make yourself aware of all of the activity on your site and it's purpose. Starting down this path is a real eye opener for most board owners.
I was going to make another attempt at adding them as a bot, but I no longer see them in the online list at all now. That robots.txt line seems to have worked. Thanks again for the line, I think this problem is solved.thecoalman wrote: ↑Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:05 pm robots.txt is only occasionally downloaded, you would need to check server access logs to see if it downloaded updated version or just wait. It should do it in a few days.
As far as the online listing it shouldn't be listed as guest if you added to bots group. Make sure you didn't copy and paste a space. Once again try clearing the cache. I don't know if clearing cache has any affect but that is something that would be cacheable.