Thanks for the list Webjustice.

As an update, since I blocked the GSLFBot yesterday my click counts are back to normal.

utrecht1976 wrote:

topnotch00007 wrote:

Do you have any knowledge about the user agent GSLFBot?

 

Dealt with the very same bot today. Is from a Amazonanws server if I am not mistaken.

Yes it is from Amazonanws. This is a bad bot, clicks endlessly on eBay links and Amazon links. Blocked it and mass clicks have stopped

I am using GeoIP from Maxmind to get the countrycode of my visitor. This I put in the customid. I am going to watch it for a while and when I see for example lots of visitors from China (CN) but no CN sales in my reports, I will not roverize links from CN anymore.

I have noticed through my bot trap that around 90% of IPs who disobey robots.txt are from China.

Is someone blocking China, and how? Takes a lot of 'deny from' rules in .htaccess I guess. Or just not roverizing when someone from CN is visiting? That seems the most appropriate solution I guess, but they can still abuse bandwidth. First I will monitor for a couple of weeks if someone from CN is actually buying or not.

I saw in my stats that visitors from Hong Kong actually buy stuff so I'll leave HK alone.

I just followed that link webjustice provided, checking on their IP blocks for CN, curious as to how big the resulting list would be. Sorta seems kinda long for adding into htaccess, but your server might handle it pretty easily if fast enough (I haven't spent much time eyeing web server performance vs. .htaccess length). Like he said, focusing on major ISPs in China, and maybe comparing with that list manually for a time, might be a better use of resources.

You could always do a live IP geolocation lookup (I think you might've said in the past that you're already doing that?) and redirect to an HTTP 403 error if in China, much like .htaccess would do when a deny-from rule checks positive. But, that could be costly or resource intensive on the lookups, depending on site traffic.

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

A user of my plugin (Wordbay) suggested I implement a filter that doesn't even display eBay listings to visitors from non-eBay countries (but Adsense or whatever you want instead). His reasoning was that those visitors are more often than not just lowering your EPC, and he turned out to be right. What I have lost in a few possible sales from outside the eBay zone, I have more than gained with an average 50% improvement to my EPC.

Another cool side-effect of this is that because a very large proportion of bad bots do not have US, UK, AU etc. IP addresses, I basically do not expose my rover links at all to these bots, and so far have had no attacks since implementing this. Something worth thinking about, though I had geo-targetting already in the plugin so it was a simple matter to filter visitors in this way.

Mark: Thanks for the tip on that. Historically I don't pay much attention to my EPCs too much, but maybe I should.

Webjustice: Thanks for the periodic bot-IP updates, for sure. ... Just 1 thing about that 2nd IP: seems that IP block is registered to eBay (DE) itself. Maybe they have some kind of probing server running?

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

IP ranges associated with PicScout (Israel)

182.72.105.0/24

84.108.11.0/24

62.219.119.0/24

192.114.64.0/20

82.80.243.0/20

Dataprovider has changed their UA change and is using additional addresses

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Dataprovider Site Explorer; http://www.dataprovider.com/)

82.192.74.0/24

Another new active Bot UA:

Python-urllib/2.6

June Bot addresses 100+ clicks, no buys

109.200.12.34

109.200.2.42
112.111.188.212
112.111.191.241
117.26.116.167
117.27.138.0/24
120.33.245.238
121.205.242.48
121.205.246.246
175.44.2.24
176.227.198.139
176.53.58.137
176.65.164.111
178.238.235.184
178.250.47.122
184.154.250.181
188.143.232.42
188.143.233.164
192.114.71.13
192.162.100.69
192.162.19.183
193.0.212.71
193.28.178.13
198.143.138.138
199.15.234.216
218.6.8.19
218.93.127.117
219.232.254.69
222.77.208.86
222.77.212.133
31.3.225.234
37.1.197.55
37.72.170.98
38.100.21.0/24
4.79.204.36
46.242.105.239
58.22.132.120
59.174.146.219
59.57.14.123
60.166.83.138
60.166.85.103
68.168.211.143
72.199.108.105
76.73.125.202
77.255.236.67
80.82.66.232
82.192.66.250
82.80.249.231
83.8.14.3
87.98.156.173
88.190.40.138
91.201.64.0/24
91.224.246.49
93.182.132.160
93.182.135.156
93.182.136.70
93.182.137.172
93.182.155.16
93.182.163.35
93.182.175.136
94.75.233.28
95.79.214.180

China bot blocks
110.80.0.0/13
27.152.0.0/13

depends on the bot and what it offers. bots that feed search engines might be worth letting in.

You can block countries, but long lists tend to add processing costs

http://ipinfodb.com/ip_country_block.php

For low volume, do whatever is easiest. For high volume, performance needs to be considered. Most efficient approaches in order are iptables, httpd.conf, htaccess, html meta, coded rules, coded rules+file, database. You may not have access to all these option on a shared host.

Blocking bots (reducing clicks) can cause short (and some long) term negative effects to your QCP earnings.

I really need some help,

I am getting plummeted again with bot clicks (I think) went from 30 to 40 clicks per day to over 200 each for the last 8 days on the same campaig.

I have checked the latest visitors logs on Cpanel for all the sites using the campaign getting hit and I see nothing unusual at all (this is how I usually check)

I do use QCT via PhpBay, clicks there are normal and also there is an IP block script I use with that

BUT

I have other adds on the pages that are not tracked by anything and I think those must be the ads getting hit (RSS feeds and a few Widgets) across these sites.

I need suggestions on how else I can try to trace this issue or find the source of the clicks and block the bots if that's what it is????

Thank you

Thank you, I will check out the link.

Maybe these are not bots, but seems odd such a high jump in clicks, though there are sales. All other times I am able to detect bot attacks with latest visitors log.

But, the only odd IP I see in the latest visitors log is Baiduspider, which, from what I have read is not necessarily malicious and it shows as clicking on a couple of posts and that's it.