• Registered: 2005-10-06
  • Posts: 17

Topic: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

Hello,

I finally managed to figure out what caused page view spikes of certain us foreign political topics. It was the spider of the Chinese/Japanese Baidu search engine.

I have banned the IP range it uses and now I am back to a few page views a day for this new forum (I had about 1000 views per day from the spider). It is a bit weird though that a spider can generate page views and count as visitors too.

My main problem now is how can reset the page views to 0 or something I can chose?

I am running the latest version.

Any help here would be amazing.  smile

thanks

exito

exito100's Website

  • Registered: 2011-08-25
  • Posts: 7

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

If you can get access to your website's MySQL databases, try looking in there.

  • From: Ukraine
  • Registered: 2008-10-31
  • Posts: 762

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

Simple way use phpmysqladmin or something for editing database.

  • Registered: 2005-10-06
  • Posts: 17

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

Thanks!
I will try my luck with phpmysqladmin . I hope I don't mess up anything. So I take it I have to edit every single thread in teh database if I wanted to reset the whole page view counter.

(the spider has mostly used only a few topics most of which are  obvious  while a others are not - I would have preferred a general reset..)

Could I suggest to fix this for the future? Is there a way to exclude spiders from being counted as guests - in particular their page views..
I just don't want to do this again. neutral

exito100's Website

  • From: Ukraine
  • Registered: 2008-10-31
  • Posts: 762

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

Use robots.txt

  • Registered: 2005-10-06
  • Posts: 17

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

dimkalinux wrote:

Use robots.txt

I did this - did not help for Baidu - only slightly reduced frequency of visits..

I am surprised nobody else has these problems..

exito100's Website

7 Reply by JanMichaels (edited by JanMichaels 2011-10-24 05:42)

  • Registered: 2011-10-20
  • Posts: 9

Re: after excessive Baidu spider visits need to reset page views - how?

I setup a spider trap for those that didn't follow the robots.txt and Baidu was the big rule breaker.  I've banned them from my forums, articles sites and they just keep coming up with more IP numbers LOL...

One option to stop them is to use a spider trap that bans them from your site if they disregard the robots.txt file (be sure though to add your spider trap page urls to robots.txt to warn the good spiders!)

Here is one example and there are more if you google "php spider trap", or "blocking spiders"..

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/4242.htm

To fix the view counts (if you haven't already), backup your database.  Then open your phpmyadmin and find your punbb database.  Click on the "topics" table, then click on the "SQL" tab at the top of the page.

Enter into the SQL tab's text field 

UPDATE `topics` SET `num_views` = 0

That will reset all the view numbers.

**Disclaimer**  I haven't tried changing the counts myself so be sure to backup your database first in case my suggestions are wrong.

best,

Jan