Hi Michael,
Mark Conservative at settings tab.
Take a look at Blocked visitors log and check the reason why you was blocked.
Then, please, let me know here or, if you don’t want post the information at public place, go to our support page:
https://billminozzi.com/support/
Cheers,
Bill
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
Bill, thanks for the quick reply. The Block Engine was set to Conservative. The visitor log was empty. I guess it was cleared when we deactivated the plugin. Now I see mostly “Blocked Fake Browser” as reason. I will check the log when it happens again.
I wonder how you can detect “faked browsers”? I suppose these are unknown user agents?
Hi Michael,
You are welcome.
Are you sure in your setting, you selected “Conservative” ?
Dashboard => Stop Bad Bots => Settings => General Settings Tab
Select Conservative
Are you running version 6.66 ?
Usually just “Blocked Fake Browser” (not Blocked Fake Browser (1) or Blocked Fake Browser (2) ) means the properties of the user agent real (discovered by system) doesn’t match with the properties of the user agent declared by browser. Operating system, for example.
Please, double check and let me know.
Cheers,
Bill
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
Yes, we are using Conservative mode and we are running 6.66. So far no new complaints after restarting the plugin. If it happens again, I will take a closer look at the user agent, browser, etc. and post here again.
Thanks a lot for the help! Great plugin!
Hi Michael,
I’ḿ glad to hear it is working fine now.
Cheers,
Bill
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
I think I found the issue now. The log entry is “Blank user agent” and it happened when a Javascript script on our page tried to open a PHP script on our site.
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
Found another incident. It happened when the Autoptimize plugin accessed its cache.
I disabled the blank user agent setting now. Let’s see if this helps.
I suggest you take a look in our plugin:
wptools
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wptools/
This plugin can show javascript and PHP errors.
Then you can fix them.
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
We don’t really have any errors. The scripts work fine.
Is the stopbadbots_record_log function supposed to create the Visit Log? If not, which function creates the Visit Log? I need to log more information to troubleshoot this issue. Stop Bad Bots still randomly blocks regular visitors, but I can’t replicate the issue.
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
I also see that you block many RSS readers. This is an example FeedDemon/4.5 (http://www.feeddemon.com/; Microsoft Windows). Is is it possible to whitelist certain URLs (like /feed/)?
Hi Michael,
Our FAQ page has a answer regards FEEDS.
https://stopbadbots.com/faq/
Look for the question: Problem with RSS FEED, smartphone or tablet APP OR some API.
You will find a lot of information there.
You don’t need make modifications in our code to put all to work. In fact, we don’t give support to modifications neither explanation regards how we made the code.
The table Block Visits Log has all information you need regards the bot or users blocked, as:
1) Date
2) IP
3) User agent
4) REASON
5) Referrer
6) URL
Stop bad bots doesn’t block your server, even though the server try to use empty user agent.
Cheers,
Bill
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
I read your FAQ about feeds, but didn’t find any relevant information there. Or do you really suggest that I go through the bot table and whitelist all known RSS readers myself? I see many popular RSS readers in the Visits Log. These are all legitimate readers that are blocked by your plugin. A RSS reader is essentially just a web browser.
And your plugin certainly did block legitimate readers because their browsers executed some of our JavaScript scripts. Only after I disabled the empty user agent setting, did this stop.
It is expected and wanted that Open Source software is modified. Your Visits Log does not contain all the information I need. For instance, I need to know if a user was logged in or not because different scripts are then executed. I also need to know which visits were not blocked for troubleshooting. Is seems you log this information in the corresponding database table but not in the Visits Log displayed in the frontend.
I will probably modify your plugin to make sure RSS readers are not blocked when they access the feed. We also block at the IP level because if you only block at the HTTP level as Stop Bad Bots does, you can’t really avert DDOS attacks or save resources because all the PHP code is executed even if you deny access. So not much is gained that way except that you make a few bot owners a little unhappy.
H Michael,
In our FAQ page, you sill find:
How to know which nickname/ip/Referer is blocking?
Then you can know what deactivate.
You can modify the plugin but we can’t give support for modifications.
Cheers,
Bill
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
You even block blog publishing software like Ulysses with the “Conservative” setting on. How can a blog editing software coming from a private IP that accesses a single page possibly be a bot? With a conservative configuration I expected that you only block user agents where you are sure that they are bots, but it seems more like you block anything that you can’t identify. This approach is doomed to fail. Many have tried (including Google) to distinguish bots from humans automatically and have failed. That’s why you see captchas everywhere.
Your plugin would be much more useful if you only block known bots or those that identify themselves as bots. This way, site owners could save resources by blocking known bots that are useless for them without risking to block legitimate readers. Those other “bad” bots with fake user agents can’t be stopped anyway.
The minimum you could do to only block unknown bots bots that access hundreds of pages within a few minutes.
Thread Starter
Michael
(@michael8888)
Bill, what you are suggesting might work for a small site. We have thousands of users and hundred thousands of page views. You really think I could manually maintain a whitelist? On the other hand, only large sites like us benefit from your plugin and small sites don’t really need it.
It just happened again that I was blocked on my iPhone using Safari. The user agent was MobileSafari/604.1 CFNetwork/1240.0.4 Darwin/20.6.0 which is a legitimate user agent.
You definitely need to revisit your strategy. I tell you this an IT analyst who has analyzed countless of software products with 40 years experience in IT.
