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View Full Version : What's up with this?



4313B
05-10-2004, 08:54 AM
What's going on with guests quoting posts, guests viewing printable forms of threads and sending those threads to "friends", etc. I didn't think guests could quote posts. Are there really that many bots scraping this website? We might need to make sure that email addresses haven't been posted, especially those with our favorite dot com as the domain name.

Robh3606
05-10-2004, 09:26 AM
"What's going on with guests quoting posts, guests viewing printable forms of threads and sending those threads to "friends", etc. I didn't think guests could quote posts. Are there really that many bots scraping this website? We might need to make sure that email addresses haven't been posted, especially those with our favorite dot com as the domain name."

Well I just came in as a quest, highlighted and copied into this message after I logged back in.

I couldn't see the Project forums but I could hit any public thread and cut paste or print whatever I wanted.

Rob:)

4313B
05-10-2004, 09:47 AM
This is one site that spent days, if not weeks, scraping our entire site - www.turnitin.com

I'm not entirely sure how their bot worked, but you could watch it systematically go through every thread.

Don McRitchie
05-10-2004, 10:52 AM
I believe the problem is how Vbulletin reports activity as opposed to what is actually happening. Almost all of the suspect activity I have seen relates to bots rumaging through our site. They appear to try every function available on any given screen. Almost all of these functions are barred to the bots because of the limited permission settings for guests. However, Vbulletin seems to report bots as performing a set function even if it was only accessed and ultimately barred by the permission settings

4313B
05-10-2004, 10:58 AM
OIC

mikebake
05-10-2004, 02:53 PM
Originally posted by Giskard
This is one site that spent days, if not weeks, scraping our entire site - www.turnitin.com

I'm not entirely sure how their bot worked, but you could watch it systematically go through every thread.

How are you able to see it doing that? What is it attempting to glean??

Hofmannhp
05-10-2004, 03:34 PM
Originally posted by mikebake
How are you able to see it doing that? What is it attempting to glean??

Hi guys,

I don't know what you mean with www.turnitin.com.....I clicked to them and can't find nothing related to LHF site. :confused:
Please tell me more.
HP