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Who's Online - Guests reading profiles?

Started by anidea, October 15, 2010, 01:23:11 AM

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anidea

Hi all,

If this is the wrong forum, please point me the way...I have a question about the Who's Online link.

Our forum is set to be completely private.  You must be a registered member to see the forum.  But still, I occasionally see the following: Guest  (216.104.00.000)      10:16:16 pm      Viewing thismember's profile.

Why/how could that be?  Shouldn't everything be hidden?  I changed the Updating of the Who's Online to 5 min, and (at least in this case) this action has spanned more than 5 minutes.

Can some explain to me what's going on, what I should check to make sure profiles are hidden from the outside world?

Thanks!

Cecilia  :)

ARG01

If everything is set to be private and it still shows a guest viewing something then it may be a spider or bot that is not actually seeing anything, just creeping through files. I have my calendar disabled and often find bots viewing it. I also have profiles hidden from guests but often get the same thing that you are experiencing. That does not mean that there is an actual person gaining access but you may want to check your Guest permissions again just to be safe.

;)
No, I will not offer free downloads to Premium DzinerStuido themes. Please stop asking.

YogiBear

The IP resolves to United States, California, Cupertino Trend Micro Inc. but according to spam.org returns negative. In other words, harmless.

I was in panic when I first saw something like this happen but what it means is the bot is trying to read that section in your forum. It doesn't mean it is succeeding in doing so.

Rest easy, anidea.  :)  You wouldn't believe what the Google deep crawler tries to do in my gallery.  :o
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anidea

Thanks, All!

That's what I thought it was, but the spiders never show up under Spiders lol and we've had some evil doing in the forum these past few weeks.  I didn't know about spam.org, but that's a great tip. 

I'm less worried about Spiders or Spam than I am about someone who has been recently banned coming back to try to do some damage to the forum.  It seems a pattern, someone insists that they have control over some aspect of the forum, and when they're not given what they want, they start calling the administrators all sorts of things, so they're given a warning...then they go on some other related forum and talk about how evil the admins are...then they get so riled up that the second they have access to post again, it's to accuse the admins of all sorts of evils.  So we've started banning people (4 so far), but now I get worried that one of them is going to have just enough technical savvy to break in and do some damage.

Boggles my mind that adults can behave this way :(  But this is why whenever I see a profile that is doing something that shows up as unknown or a guest profile doing something it shouldn't, I freak out just a little bit ;)

Thanks for the link to Arantor's mods, that will certainly help :)

ARG01

Quote from: anidea on October 15, 2010, 11:10:18 AM


...then they go on some other related forum and talk about how evil the admins are...then they get so riled up that the second they have access to post again, it's to accuse the admins of all sorts of evils.


Nothing new there. I have been admin on many forums and have see this many times.  The thing is, they are usually immature and if they complain on one site about admins on another, sooner or later they will be labeled as a troublemaker and more than likely be banned from other sites as well because nobody really wants to waste their time with someone that does nothing but complain about what happens on other sites. Permanently banning them and moving on is your best bet.  ;)
No, I will not offer free downloads to Premium DzinerStuido themes. Please stop asking.

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Hi anidea, as it seems your question was answered I'll mark this topic solved. But if there is anything you still need to ask related to the whos online, then feel free to mark this topic not solved and let us know :)
Slava
Ukraini!
"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

anidea

Quote from: LexArma on November 01, 2010, 04:07:58 AM
Hi anidea, as it seems your question was answered I'll mark this topic solved. But if there is anything you still need to ask related to the whos online, then feel free to mark this topic not solved and let us know :)

I think it's all good now :)  Well, at least as far as the who's online. ;)  Thanks!!!

anidea

ok, more (negative) action on our forum today...and

I catch a 150.x ip that says it's looking at my profile.  In order to do that, it has to be logged into the forum, no?

But Japan is not a likely continent for someone to be subscribed to the forum.  And at one point there's 4-5 of them.  But this one in particular says it's looking at my profile.

What can I do?  if I click on the ip, it doesn't show a registered member name.  But what if a registered member is using a masked ip address?  What can I do?

Sorry, but the nastiness on the forum has reached new levels.  So bad that I'm thinking of closing it, after all this effort :(

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Still, people can be seen as viewing profiles, since the whos online does not check to see if they actually can do it - when in reality, they are only seeing a "you have to be logged in" error when trying :)
Slava
Ukraini!
"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

anidea

Quote from: LexArma on November 08, 2010, 12:48:58 AM
Still, people can be seen as viewing profiles, since the whos online does not check to see if they actually can do it - when in reality, they are only seeing a "you have to be logged in" error when trying :)

But if I have it set so that guests can't see the member list, and they can't see the who's online list, then how would the forum know that the guest is potentially looking at *MY* profile?  That's the confusing part. 

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

It takes that from the url, and search engines, spambots etc. Usually follow any  links they find, pretty much blindly - so if it can see you online, or see any of your posts, it will bump in to link leading to your profile as well. You can test this all if you want, just fire up two browser, one you log in as admin and one you use as guest - then see how different guest actions show to the admin :)
Slava
Ukraini!
"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

anidea

Quote from: LexArma on November 08, 2010, 12:57:37 PM
It takes that from the url, and search engines, spambots etc. Usually follow any  links they find, pretty much blindly - so if it can see you online, or see any of your posts, it will bump in to link leading to your profile as well. You can test this all if you want, just fire up two browser, one you log in as admin and one you use as guest - then see how different guest actions show to the admin :)

I am going to try this!  Why didn't I think of it before?  How silly :)

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