Google Adsense Activated

[Gomez Adams]

Man, this is awful.

So I did a lot of reading and come to find out there are bots out there that will actually ruin you because they set off clicks. I've spent all morning working on my Robots.txt to try to block them and many of them simply ignore it.

One of the worst offenders is Aspiegel PetalBot. That's the Chinese one that is screwing everybody up. I've blocked it in Robots.txt and they ignore it. I created a firewall rule in Cloudflare and so far they're ignoring that too.

Going back and looking at the data, I saw I got two clicks from Nigeria for 14 cents. Yeah, that's bogus as hell. I tell you, you have to be an absolute rocket scientist to get anything done these days.

 

[Zeedox]

Is this adsense's problem in not recognizing the bots?

 

[Gomez Adams]

Is this adsense's problem in not recognizing the bots?

Apparently not.

That firewall rule did start working though, it just took a while. It's already blocked 29 instances of PetalBot.

If you notice, the number of guest and robots has dropped rather dramatically, so it's starting to work.

 

[Hugo Stiglitz]

I tell you, you have to be an absolute rocket scientist to get anything done these days.

That's no shit. They make everything as difficult as possible these days to make their jobs secure. Want a site? Pay for a host. Don't know how to set that up, pay a guy. The guy tells you that you need some shit, you pay another guy for that. That guy says it's all fixed? It's not and you have to hire somebody else to fix what he screwed up.

And on and on and on.

Is this adsense's problem in not recognizing the bots?

It damn well should be. You would think the almighty Google could figure out a small site like this with relative ease.

 

[Gomez Adams]

That firewall rule did start working though, it just took a while. It's already blocked 29 instances of PetalBot.

So just since yesterday, check this out:

 

[Zeedox]

Awwww, they like us...

 

[Hugo Stiglitz]

Damn. So that's 519 visits from one bot in roughly a day? I'm not an internet guy so I don't know what that translates into but shit. It seems excessive as hell.

 

[Gomez Adams]

It is. In contrast, Google sends about a dozen different bots here 20 times a day or so.

 

[Gomez Adams]

I just had a popup ad when I hit a thread to reply to a post. So maybe blocking a lot of those Chinese bots is clearing the way again. Firsts ad I've seen since they were restricted.

 

[Zeedox]

I've had moments of screen freezing requiring a page re-load. Once re-loaded there is an ad space (that wasn't there before) but no ad? I've had my ad guard stuff off for this site and was having no problems until about 2, maybe 3, days ago. I've now turned on the ad guard and the pages load without freezing but if I linger before typing a response it still freezes but takes longer to freeze? I didn't mind the ads here as it helps us.

 

[Gomez Adams]

Cool. Thanks!

 

[Grimhogun]

I keep seeing the holes where they should be but no ads. And l also keep having this weird issue where I can't click on the box to replay to a thread. I hit the refresh button once or twice and it seems to fix it.