I received a couple of emails about “too many hits” on my site. I don’t quite understand. It can’t really be close to the 50K of hits per day limit. I have hit counters and the numbers are low. I know a single user session can account for a high number of hits, but I also know that the most people who have ever been on myBB forum simultaneously is 14.
Is there a way to see a report on how much traffic is incoming and source of it all?
If its from legit traffic, I’d be glad to pay the $5 per month for premium. But Unfortunaly I suspect it could be an ongoing DDos attack. If I cant see a report, can someone report back to me about my traffic?
Since you use Cloudflare
here in the article as well as in the comments below,
it is stated how you can see the traffic to some extent
The version from the comments has now been slightly changed on CF
due to changes to Cloudflare and you need to use “skip”
You can also have a script on the hosting
which will record the traffic, but this is undesirable if it is a DDoS or larger traffic, because the script itself will then use the CPU, RAM, etc., and contribute to the suspension.
And of course, since you use Cloudflare, you have to convert the CF IP that the script will see into a visitor IP
hit counter depends on JS
but someone or a bot can request a non-existent address
or take any irregular path where there is no hit counter script at all
It would be good if you additionally introduce restrictions on Cloudflare
for example turnstile or captcha checks, rate limit, etc. or you say “I’m under DDoS” in CF rules for that loc. because spam bots love forums and try to log in or write there.
A hit counter counts the hits to the hit counter script, which are usually roughly equal to page views. But a single page view can result in dozens of hits to load all the styles, scripts, fonts and images, which no hit counter or most analytics system can account for.
The number of concurrent users doesn’t really mean a lot for the total number of hits either. If those 14 active users all read a single post and left, and the rest of the day your site wasn’t being used, your hits usage will be low. If those 14 users were there 24/7 constantly navigating to different pages, your hits usage will be quite high.
The hits graph in the control panel shows hardly any usage at all right now, but it’s possible that the wave of traffic only started today, so you should be able to see the usage in the graph tomorrow.
I’ve implemented many f your suggestions Oxy & I would like to thank you and Admin for all the great info.
Lets see what; captcha checks & under attack mode, Bot Fight Mode, DDoS rules etc, does for me…
Thanks again