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Strange hits on the forum members page

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URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=2251
Printed Date: 31 March 2026 at 4:32pm
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Topic: Strange hits on the forum members page
Posted By: snapey
Subject: Strange hits on the forum members page
Date Posted: 28 April 2003 at 3:43pm

In the Matrix Stats I get back from my web host, I have been surprised to see a high number of session entry points at the /forum/forum_members.asp page, and this page being the only page viewed in a session.

Is this anything I should be worried about?
Should I add this page to robots.txt or is it too late for that?

Could the list on this page then be used to construct another query which then returns email addresses?

Obviously I want to make sure that people passing over their email address are not going to end up on spam lists as a result.

Thanks for any advice.

Mark



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Ta much - Mark



Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 29 April 2003 at 6:29am

I've noticed the same thing, I think myself that spiders looking for email addresses are setup to look more closly at pages that have words like members in the page title.

However, you can only view members if you are a logged in user to the forum, and as of yet I haven't seen a spider that is clever enough to register on a forum. So it sholdn't be able to get any email addresses.

Although it is worth advising people not to show there email address in the forum and also not to place their email address in posts.



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Posted By: pedalcars
Date Posted: 29 April 2003 at 7:13am
Originally posted by snapey snapey wrote:

Is this anything I should be worried about?
Should I add this page to robots.txt or is it too late for that?



You could add it to robots.txt, but if, as -boRg- suspects, these are email-harvesters, it'll probably make little difference.

My new site is on a test server and so the robots.txt is currently set to exclude all spiders from the entire site - yet there's still a large number of "visitors" at times (many more than the number of people I've told about the test location).

My guess is these are harvesters that simply ignore robots.txt because the originators really don't care, so long as they get any email addresses there might be about the place!


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http://www.pedalcars.info/ - www.pedalcars.info

The most fun on four wheels




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