Thanks for the heads-up here.

What kind of UAs are you seeing from these bots?

[Some Handy Aggregated Reference Info for ePN Affiliates and eBay Developers]

Thanks for that.

Frankly, I'm not spending too much time/effort on trying to block/de-roverize bot clicks. I guess I'm erring on the let-it-through side, unless I'm able to block such clicks systematically through screens I already have setup, or I notice unusual/suspicious behavior that leads me to manually add an IP/range to one of the blacklists I maintain.

While I don't know anything about ePN's bot/click filters, I'm implicitly relying on them to a good degree. Also, while I make some efforts to weed out low-quality clicks, I haven't completely bought into the belief that low EPCs lead to low earnings. Maybe I just haven't paid close enough attention, but I'm been (perhaps naively) operating under the assumption that EPC is a post-calculation -- earnings are calculated against various internal measures (WBR, ACRUs, click-to-bid/BIN time, etc.), then simply draped over the click counts to arrive at a calculated EPC.

But in the end, I'm still really not sure how EPC fits into ePN's quality and payout determinations. So I guess I too am on the fence about how much click-scrubbing I want to engage in.

[Some Handy Aggregated Reference Info for ePN Affiliates and eBay Developers]

Another click bot out of Israel

62.219.8.225 - 62.219.8.231

62.219.8.0/24

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.91 Safari/534.30

Mozilla/6.0 (compatible)

My clicks more than doubled yesterday, and my website visits stay within the last 30 day average. So I am wondering if this isn't click bots. All of my campaigns went up in clicks so it wasn't just one.

What's confusion is that my campaigns are only on a handful of pages, so even a click bot would have to visit hundreds of pages to spread the clicks out like this.

I am not blocking anything presently, but this did make me take notice.

@webjustice911

What tool do you use to track the clicks and their IP's?

I use QCT with PhpBay, but what's weird is that QCT is not showing nearly as many clicks as are showing in my EPN reports?

Thank you

@@webjustice911

Thank you.

Do you have any knowledge about the user agent GSLFBot?

This is the one that I think is causing me the most probelms, I see it on several recent visitors logs for the campaigns that have the unusually high click counts.

It is clicking on ebay and Amazon links over and over.

And searching Google shows other blogs commenting that this blot ignores robots, drains bandwidth and maybe a content scraper..

GSLF BOT IP's
23.20.138.203
50.16.28.173
184.73.75.144

Seeing it since Apr 1, but just looking at robots.txt and home page. No past activity, no clicks to ebay. All amazon ec2

23.20.86.100

174.129.54.43

107.22.43.168

107.21.162.45

174.129.183.98

107.20.10.145

184.73.75.144

184.72.163.91

187.73.101.135

184.73.0.161

23.20.226.141

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gslfbot

Thank you I will report, though I think it's been reported before.

This GSLFbot is using so many different IP's that it's impossible to keep up with blocking individual IP's.

I am now using htaacess on shared hosting for each site to block the user agent and also the httpd.conf on my VPS server.

This bot is doing nothing but clicking on eBay and Amazon links over and over, and I think I have traced it as the source of the unusually immense click counts I have had this month.

Is there a way to report this to EPN as well?

topnotch00007 wrote:

 

This GSLFbot is using so many different IP's that it's impossible to keep up with blocking individual IP's.

 

I am now using htaacess on shared hosting for each site to block the user agent and also the httpd.conf on my VPS server.

Blocking identified bots by UA is the correct approach.

It's also reasonable for most sites to block all of Amazon's EC2. EC2 is Amazon's cloud hosting. http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/AMAZO-4/nets

Click thru to each entry that contains EC2, get the CIDR range, and block the entire range. should be under ten rules to block it all. That will get any new GSLFBot IPs that are spawned and any other EC2 hosted bots too.

Then verify that any amazon content/services you need from the server and any friendly bots you want visiting you aren't blocked.

webjustice911 wrote:

Then verify that any amazon content/services you need from the server and any friendly bots you want visiting you aren't blocked.

Sorry my other message got messed up. How do you verify this?

Me too. One website which I have for years didn't have any problems, until the clicks to ebay increased sixfold on the 3rd April.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^GSLFbot

RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

topnotch00007 wrote:

webjustice911 wrote:

Then verify that any amazon content/services you need from the server and any friendly bots you want visiting you aren't blocked.

 

Sorry my other message got messed up. How do you verify this?

probably better to verify the bots before blocking. Just make sure the IP your friendly bots use isn't in the range you are blocking.

As for amazon or other data feeds, it should be pretty apparent if you can no longer reach the data feed. Again, just check the IPs you need to access before blocking anything.

I've seen people setup a autoblocking script that blocks anything that accessed the website more than X times per minute and end up blocking googlebot. Always need to be aware of the scope of what your blocking and make sure the friendlies can get thru.