Incorrect ban trigger count

[Don Peters]

I'm running SMF 1.1.11, and had been using a number of bans, mainly by IP address. I checked my ban list, and browsed by ban triggers, IP address. I saw one of my banned spambots listed there with a "Hits" count of 32. I know I'd seen this spambot listed many more times in my log file, so I decided to count the number of log file entries for this IP address. I counted 87 hits.

So, if there are 87 hits from this IP address in my log file, why doesn't the ban triggers "Hits" also register these 87 hits?

[Don Peters]

I think I found the reason. There appears to be a serious logging bug in SMF, which means all its statistics are way off. Here's an example of the problem:

A spammer/spambot attempts to access my website, but is banned. The access attempt is recorded in the log file and ban records properly. So far, so good. Then the spammer, being persistant, gets another session Id, and hammers my website 5 more times in succession. The log file properly logs all of these 5 attempts. BUT ONLY ONE HIT is recorded in the ban count records!

This explains why my log files were sometimes filled with specific spammers, but my ban hit logs didn't reflect this. It wasn't until I started looking at the session Id that it all became clear. I wonder if SMF version 2 has this problem.

[emanuele]

This is like this simply because once the spammer has been identified a cookie (that last for 1 hour) is set on his side storing the ban informations to avoid few queries.

Not sure if such level of detail is really needed...