A competing (well kinda) website just participated in bombing one of my forums with hundreds of vulgar pictures and (I have free flash games as well) and were trying to shut the server down by accessing as many games as they could. The other website has a couple MILLION posts and 134,000 members. Why did they do it? Well, our websites are 1 letter off and but we have absolutely nothing in common other than we are both forums. I mean, my server load went through the roof - If I didn't catch it right when I did they would have shut it down. I am on a shared server, mind you and I have kids also on the website. Between to bombardment of gay porn and the massive amounts of hits - it's been a rough 30 minutes. I've contacted the admin of the offending website, although I don't know if they instigated it or not. How could I hold this website responsible for encouraging their members (probably over 1000) to participate. It's still going on now, although I've deactivated new registration and guest views. This puts a serious hurting on my newly found traffic, I've been promoting the site and I guess thats how they found out about me, although I've had that site up for a year now. Man, this sucks. What can I do?
If you have evidence that they did it; you can go to either that ISP or host and it can be dealt with legally.
Yes I do, the referral hits and I can see a thread on their forums with 300 posts about us. I don't know whats in it because it's in their "private" paid only members room. They've got 4 servers, and make alot of money. I'm pretty sure they host themselves.
have you blocked hits from being referred from their site? most will be following a link there and not entering it in the address bar
You could change registration to be approved only by the admin, that way they couldn't register and post stuff like that. And/or make a min. amount of posts before being allowed to post such files or items. Such options are available using vBulletin. Not sure what software you're using...
i have ipb and you also have the option of hand approving new registrations, i can only imagine most of the major forum software has that option. by the way to block from visitors from a referrer use this in you htacces replacing "blockedsite" with the site ofcourse, and change the tld if necessary
I've already set admin approval, and blocked guests from playing the games. It's costing me about 10 members a day and it really pisses me off. The owner of the website had the thread removed, but now their is another thread about it. Their entire website is full of nothing but posts about doing drugs, partying, half the thread titles have cuss words in them, many of the member usernames are vulgar. It's obviously one of those places that could care less about morals or doing the right thing. Oh well, it sucks. The forum will never be the same again.
UPDATE: I've spoken to the admin and mods there a few times now and they've cleaned up their site of all references to mine and "pm'd" the two people instigating it. I've removed all traces of the attack, fortunately it happened at 12am so thats much better than at 9pm when traffic is high. Still sucks though. Oh, aqi I tried your htaccess code but it caused a 500 server error. I already am using mod rewrite so I added this code at the bottom of the file: # Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} forums.theirsite \.com [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F]
do you mean adding at after your existing rewrite caused the error or it's now working after having placed it there?