Too many anonimouse users

[Azmandius]

Hello,
I always had the option to count guest users enabled, and for the last 3 days i can see an irregularly big and unchanged number of anonymous users, displayed as online.

I am sure its not a normal case, as for last 6 month a never had a number like that, so i know its an issue to check, but its an issue only for the anonymous option.

Is there a way to reset the module like manually delete all entries from jos_session table, or something like that?

Thank you.

[Darkick]

May be your site is under scan of some robots (LinkFeed, SAPE, etc). Of course you can clean jos_session table to reset all counts.

[Azmandius]

Yes, that's what i first thought, robots did scan my site before for some days, and its was manifested as anonymous users, but this time its different, its goes on for more than a a week, there are always minimum 10 invisible users online, but i surely know that is not true information.
So wondering what should i do...

[Azmandius]

May be your site is under scan of some robots (LinkFeed, SAPE, etc). Of course you can clean jos_session table to reset all counts.

I have cleaned jos_session table, and while anonymous users number went to 0, in about 30 sec. and grew back to a big number, which makes me think its a bug.
What annoys is that anonymous users number stays big 24 hours / 7 days a week.
That can't be true statistics, i am almost sure its a fake information, and that compromises my site.
Any more ideas on what can be done?
Thank you.

[Darkick]

The module only retrieve information from jos_session table, so it's not the reason of the big number of sessions. Make SQL-dump of the jos_session table and attach the archive here.

[Azmandius]

You mean export jos_session table?
Attached.
Thank you.

[Darkick]

Ok. The big number of guests really generated by scanner or some other tool. There is such user-agent in huge count:

Code: Select all

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 GTB7.1

It's strange user-agent name because it start with string User-Agent:, but even user-agents don't have this string. There must be only

Code: Select all

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 GTB7.1

You can exclude this UA from the guests count and count it as a robot, for example the [Bot].
In the Who Online module settings modify list of the Robots. At the end of the list find string like this one:

Code: Select all

[Bot]=bot,crawl,search,spider,web,worm,Mozilla/4.75 [en]

and append comma (,) and User-Agent:
Your last string will be look like this:

Code: Select all

[Bot]=bot,crawl,search,spider,web,worm,Mozilla/4.75 [en],User-Agent:

[Azmandius]

Thank you very much!
A applied that change and will give it one day to see if things get fine.
Regards.

Edit: already i can see huge changes, so far no fake anonymous users online! Yahooo! Thanks again.