Posted by pasathappyvalley on

Hi Joe,  I have been using the REPORTS feature over the last months and noticed an anomaly in the figures for March.

I was drawn to the 'Pages Viewed' figures which are normally around ten's on a daily basis but could rise to over a hundred on odd days.  But during March between the 8th and 11th they rose to over 7000.  I wondered if there was a common explanation??

Regards

pasathappyvalley

calderdalecalligraphers.org.uk

2: Re: REPORTS feature (response to 1)
Posted by Joe Oldak on

If you look further down the report you'll see that the main pages being hit are /register/wizard and /register. This will have been spam-bots trying over and over again to register or login to your site.

They probably look like "proper" browsers on purpose, which is why the reports have failed to identify them as robots.

This is, unfortunately, standard behaviour for spam-bots, and we do try to filter them out (both by blocking them, and then trying to filter them out of the reports).

We'll continue to try to improve both these aspects - preventing the bots hitting the site, and preventing them making the stats go wonky.

One simple thing I could try is removing the register/login pages completely from the stats (since presumably you're a lot more interested in who is visiting real pages than how many times people try to log in!)

So, unfortunately, you'll for now just have to ignore these extra hits in the stats, and I'll see if I can do some things to improve it going forward.

Cheers

Joe