Do Not Be Scared!!!

Main Site And Tools Still Running For Now

By Strictly-Software

Just to let you know that the main site with all the tools such as the:

• Best JavaScript HTML Encoder & Decoder available, handles double encoding, numeric or entity.
• Depacking packed code, even if it's been packed multiple times and reformatting it to a readable state.
• My top WordPress Strictly-AutoTags plugin (Free/Professional), which gives you automated #SEO, deep-linking, and automatic tagging of important words with no 3rd party lookups. No need to check a list of names, if John Smith carries out a wicked crime tonight that is in articles you post automatically then it will find the word and bold it to aid SEO.
• My top WordPress Strictly-TweetBot plugin, that allows you to tweet to multiple accounts, only if certain words are found in an article OR NOT, using different hash tags made up from either #posttags #categories or #default tags. The professional version has a way of caching the page first before Tweeting so that you are not overwhelmed by any Twitter Rush when you Tweet. Timers can be placed between each Tweet out as well.
• Lots of free scripts and code that fix holes in frameworks like jQuery.
• SQL Performance scripts and tuning procedures.
• Plus lots lots more....

Is still working and you CAN STILL ACCESS IT......

All that has happened is that I can no longer can access the server, due to new security on the site that hosts it. They have added an extra layer of security in which sends an email out to an address I have no access to requesting the code they sent out to be entered on their site to get in. Therefore I cannot get into the servers site, to then use their Java applet to get into the server to add my ever changing IPv4 address to the firewall.

Therefore when you try and go to www.strictly-software.com you will probably see some sort of warning message from your browser like the one shown in the picture below. It will say the site is not secure and hackers maybe trying to steal your data - that is rubbish. 

All that has happened is that due to not being able to renew my SSL certificate, the site is no longer https, no-one is trying to steal your data. I just have not been able to put an SSL on my webserver.

So ignore the message, hit "Advanced", then you should see a "Proceed To Site" link underneath, click that and you can still access the site for now.

Here are two examples, one from Brave/Chrome, the other Opera.

Chrome trying to block access to the site

Opera trying to block access, click the bottom link to get to the site

So no-one is trying to hack you or steal your information, just go to "Advanced" and then click the "Proceed to www.strictly-software.com" link.

All I would suggest is if you are going to buy one of my top WordPress plugins that you do NOT use a PUBLIC WIFI SPOT. 

Do it at home, use a VPN if you can, but do NOT do it at as you are walking down the street being connected and re-connected to various BT public WIFI hotspots. 

I am sure 99% of them are safe as the users have no technical knowledge to set up their own DNS server and take you somewhere else other than my site, but just to be safe do it at HOME or on a PRIVATE network.

Hope this helps anyone trying to get to the main site.

By Strictly-Software

© 2021 Strictly-Software

Premium Plugins Cut Half In Price!

Premium Plugins Cut Half In Price!

By Strictly-Software

Just to let you know the Premium Plugins for Wordpress, Strictly AutoTags and Strictly TweetBOT have been cut in price, by HALF!

These two plugins which can be used in conjunction with each other to fully automate a site are now only £20 each and can be purchased from my main sites secure payment page.

With both of these plugins together (both for PHP 5 and 7), feed content can be automatically loaded with a feed loading plugin before tags automatically being added to the articles with Strictly AutoTags.

Then you can Tweet out to one or more accounts different Tweets, with different content, shortened or not, with a time delay to stop Twitter Rushes with Strictly TweetBOT.

The premium plugins have many more features than the free versions and since Wordpress has taken them off their site, despite over half a million downloads, you can only get them from my site.

Try the free versions first if you want, however the options in the premium versions are there for performance, extra functionality and speed.

HALF PRICE PLUGINS TO AUTOMATE YOUR WORDPRESS SITE!

What more can you want if you work with Wordpress and feeds to give yourself good SEO, tagging and social media presence automatically?

Link your Twitter account up with a Facebook page and you can post from your site to Twitter to Facebook all whilst you work or relax.

Safely knowing you will grow your site with new tags, limit the number of deeplinking to prevent single new tags creating pages, and get your tags turned into Twitter #hashtags!

What more can you want?

Check out my Facebook page for more info!

Twitter Rush - The Rush just gets bigger and bigger!

Twitter Rush - The Rush Just Gets Bigger And Bigger!

By Strictly-Software

The amount of BOTs, social media sites and scrapers that hit your site after you post a Tweet with a link in it to a site to Twitter just gets bigger and bigger. When I first started recording the BOTS that hit my site after a post to Twitter it was about 15 now it has grown to over 100+!

You can read about my previous analysis of Twitter Rushes here and here however today I am posting the findings of a recent blog posting using my Strictly TweetBOT WordPress plugin to Twitter and the 108 HTTP Requests that followed in the following minutes after posting.

If you are not careful these Twitter Rushes could consume your web servers CPU and Memory as well as making a daisy chain of processes waiting to be completed that could cause high server loads and long connection / wait times for the pages to load.

You will notice that the first item in the list is a POST to the article.

That is because in the PRO version of my Stricty TweetBOT I have an option to send an HTTP request to the page before Tweeting. Then you can wait a few seconds (a setting you control), before any Tweets are sent out to ensure the plugin has enough time to cache the page.

This is so that if you have a Caching Plugin installed (e.g on WordPress WP Super Cache) or another system, the page is hopefully cached into memory or hand written as an HTML file to prevent any overload when the Twitter Rush comes.

It is always quicker to deliver a static HTML file to users than a dynamic PHP/.NET file that needs DB access etc.

So here are the results of today's test.

Notice how I return 403 status codes to many of the requests. 

This is because I block any bandwidth wasters that bring no benefit at all to my site.

The latest batch of these bandwidth wasters seem to be social media and brand awareness BOTS that want to see if their brand or site is mentioned in the article.

They are of no benefit to you at all and you should either block them using your firewall or with a 403 status code in your .htacces file.

Please also note the amount of duplicate requests from either the same IP address or the same company e.g TwitterBOT or Facebook that are made to the page. Why they do this I do not know!

The Recent Twitter Rush Test - 28-MAY-2015

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - - [28/May/2015:17:08:17 +0100] "POST /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?r=12 HTTP/1.1" 200 22265 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (http://www.strictly-software.com) Strictly TweetBot/1.1.2" 1/1582929
184.173.106.130 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:22 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "ShowyouBot (http://showyou.com/crawler)" 0/3372
199.16.156.124 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:21 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22377 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0" 1/1301263
199.16.156.125 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:21 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22375 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0" 1/1441183
185.20.4.220 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:21 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22377 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (TweetmemeBot/4.0; +http://datasift.com/bot.html) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0" 1/1224266
17.142.151.49 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:21 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22375 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)" 1/1250324
151.252.28.203 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:22 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22374 "http://bit.ly/1eA4GYZ" "Go 1.1 package http" 1/1118106
46.236.26.102 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:23 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22376 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (TweetmemeBot/4.0; +http://datasift.com/bot.html) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0" 0/833367
199.16.156.124 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:23 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22376 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0" 0/935200
142.4.216.19 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:24 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenHoseBot/2.1; +http://www.openhose.org/bot.html)" 0/1964
17.142.152.131 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:24 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22375 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)" 0/875740
52.5.154.238 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:25 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22376 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31" 1/1029660
4.71.170.35 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:26 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate HTTP/1.1" 403 251 "-" "grokkit-crawler (pdsupport@purediscovery.com)" 0/1883
192.99.19.38 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:26 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenHoseBot/2.1; +http://www.openhose.org/bot.html)" 0/1927
141.223.91.115 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:28 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "_bit=55673d4a-0024b-030a1-261cf10a;domain=.bit.ly;expires=Tue Nov 24 16:07:38 2015;path=/; HttpOnly" "-" 1/1592735
17.142.151.101 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:32 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)" 17/17210294
184.173.106.130 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:49 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "ShowyouBot (http://showyou.com/crawler)" 0/1870
142.4.216.19 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:49 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenHoseBot/2.1; +http://www.openhose.org/bot.html)" 0/1601
52.6.187.68 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:28 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22262 "-" "Typhoeus - https://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus" 20/20260090
45.33.89.102 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:28 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22262 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36" 20/20370939
134.225.2.7 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:26 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (TweetmemeBot/4.0; +http://datasift.com/bot.html) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0" 22/22337338
2a03:2880:1010:3ff4:face:b00c:0:8000 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:25 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22261 "-" "facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)" 23/23973749
134.225.2.7 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:27 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (TweetmemeBot/4.0; +http://datasift.com/bot.html) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0" 21/21602431
54.167.214.223 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:25 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36" 24/24164062
4.71.170.35 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "grokkit-crawler (pdsupport@purediscovery.com)" 0/1688
192.99.19.38 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenHoseBot/2.1; +http://www.openhose.org/bot.html)" 0/1594
54.246.137.243 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "python-requests/1.2.3 CPython/2.7.6 Linux/3.13.0-44-generic" 0/1736
92.246.16.201 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0" 0/725424
4.71.170.35 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:55 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "grokkit-crawler (pdsupport@purediscovery.com)" 0/1808
2a03:2880:2130:9ff3:face:b00c:0:1 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:57 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate HTTP/1.1" 301 144 "-" "facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)" 0/657830
54.198.122.232 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) (Contact: backend@getprismatic.com)" 7/7227418
2a03:2880:1010:3ff7:face:b00c:0:8000 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22255 "-" "facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)" 7/7169003
54.198.122.232 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:51 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22257 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) (Contact: backend@getprismatic.com)" 7/7185701
2607:5300:60:3b37:: - - [28/May/2015:17:08:53 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0" 5/5298648
2a03:2880:2130:9ff7:face:b00c:0:1 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:56 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22267 "-" "facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)" 1/1999466
178.32.216.193 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:49 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "http://bit.ly/1eA4GYZ" "LivelapBot/0.2 (http://site.livelap.com/crawler)" 9/9518327
199.59.148.209 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:58 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0" 1/1680322
54.178.210.226 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:58 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22257 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 1/1842148
54.198.122.232 - - [28/May/2015:17:08:58 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) (Contact: backend@getprismatic.com)" 1/1903731
54.198.122.232 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:00 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) (Contact: backend@getprismatic.com)" 1/1131792
2607:5300:60:3b37:: - - [28/May/2015:17:09:00 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0" 1/1048667
199.59.148.209 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:02 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0" 1/1024583
54.178.210.226 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:02 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 1/1251088
65.52.240.20 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:03 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)" 0/814087
54.92.69.38 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:04 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/925457
54.92.69.38 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:05 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22266 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/932984
54.178.210.226 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:06 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/927202
54.178.210.226 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:08 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22260 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/717344
54.167.123.237 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:09 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0 (FlipboardProxy/1.1; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy)" 0/2286
54.178.210.226 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:12 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22254 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/971022
37.187.165.195 - - [28/May/2015:17:09:52 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PaperLiBot/2.1; http://support.paper.li/entries/20023257-what-is-paper-li)" 0/688208
74.112.131.244 - - [28/May/2015:17:10:24 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22257 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 ()" 3/3572262
52.68.118.157 - - [28/May/2015:17:11:35 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/688056
52.68.118.157 - - [28/May/2015:17:11:35 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/719851
52.68.118.157 - - [28/May/2015:17:11:37 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22256 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/739706
52.68.118.157 - - [28/May/2015:17:11:38 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22258 "-" "Crowsnest/0.5 (+http://www.crowsnest.tv/)" 0/760912
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:12:05 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/248578
66.249.67.148 - - [28/May/2015:17:12:38 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22259 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" 0/493468
54.145.93.204 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:25 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "jack" 0/1495
54.145.93.204 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:26 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22257 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2008091620 Firefox/3.0.2" 0/597310
178.33.236.214 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:41 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Kraken/0.1; http://linkfluence.net/; bot@linkfluence.net)" 0/2065
173.203.107.206 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:50 +0100] "POST /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?r=12 HTTP/1.1" 200 22194 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (http://www.strictly-software.com) Strictly TweetBot/1.1.2" 4/4801717
184.173.106.130 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:58 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "ShowyouBot (http://showyou.com/crawler)" 0/96829
178.32.216.193 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:57 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22303 "http://bit.ly/1eA4GYZ" "LivelapBot/0.2 (http://site.livelap.com/crawler)" 1/1032211
192.99.1.145 - - [28/May/2015:17:13:59 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22303 "http://bit.ly/1eA4GYZ" "LivelapBot/0.2 (http://site.livelap.com/crawler)" 1/1535270
184.173.106.130 - - [28/May/2015:17:14:02 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "ShowyouBot (http://showyou.com/crawler)" 0/1764
52.6.187.68 - - [28/May/2015:17:14:01 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22293 "-" "Typhoeus - https://github.com/typhoeus/typhoeus" 66/66512611
146.148.22.255 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:10 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22292 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Climatebot/1.0; +http://climate.k39.us/bot.html)" 0/885387
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:11 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 1/1789256
146.148.22.255 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:17 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22290 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Climatebot/1.0; +http://climate.k39.us/bot.html)" 1/1275245
54.162.7.197 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:18 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22291 "http://bit.ly/1eA4GYZ" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.107 Safari/534.13 v1432829642.1352" 0/711142
146.148.22.255 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:24 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22293 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Climatebot/1.0; +http://climate.k39.us/bot.html)" 0/742404
54.162.7.197 - - [28/May/2015:17:15:32 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22289 "-" "msnbot/2.0b v1432829684.8617" 0/717679
23.96.208.137 - - [28/May/2015:17:16:05 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22294 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)" 0/560954
69.164.211.40 - - [28/May/2015:17:17:38 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22293 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/516967
96.126.110.221 - - [28/May/2015:17:18:24 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22300 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/464585
69.164.217.210 - - [28/May/2015:17:18:42 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22288 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/482230
173.255.232.252 - - [28/May/2015:17:19:03 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22293 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/514587
173.255.232.252 - - [28/May/2015:17:19:12 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22288 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/858459
96.126.110.222 - - [28/May/2015:17:19:26 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22288 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; EveryoneSocialBot/1.0; support@everyonesocial.com http://everyonesocial.com/)" 0/469048
92.222.100.96 - - [28/May/2015:17:19:28 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22291 "-" "sfFeedReader/0.9" 0/574409
54.176.17.88 - - [28/May/2015:17:20:20 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DarkPolitricks+%28Dark+Politricks%29 HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36" 1/1112283
184.106.123.180 - - [28/May/2015:17:20:56 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22285 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14" 0/522039
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:22:35 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/260972
54.163.57.132 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:05 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Ruby" 0/2749
54.163.57.132 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:07 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Ruby" 0/1647
54.163.57.132 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:09 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Ruby" 0/1487
178.33.236.214 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:14 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DarkPolitricks+%28Dark+Politricks%29 HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Kraken/0.1; http://linkfluence.net/; bot@linkfluence.net)" 0/1996
168.63.10.14 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:23 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "Apache-HttpClient/4.1.2 (java 1.5)" 0/1602
168.63.10.14 - - [28/May/2015:17:23:23 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Apache-HttpClient/4.1.2 (java 1.5)" 0/1486
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:24:05 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/260635
45.33.35.236 - - [28/May/2015:17:24:59 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22284 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 ( compatible ; Veooz/1.0 ; +http://www.veooz.com/veoozbot.html )" 0/618370
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:25:35 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/255700
70.39.246.37 - - [28/May/2015:17:26:10 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22283 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 Moreover/5.1 (+http://www.moreover.com; webmaster@moreover.com)" 0/469127
82.25.13.46 - - [28/May/2015:17:28:55 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22285 "https://www.facebook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.81 Safari/537.36" 0/568199
157.55.39.84 - - [28/May/2015:17:29:17 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22284 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" 0/478186
188.138.124.201 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:10 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22284 "-" "ADmantX Platform Semantic Analyzer - ADmantX Inc. - www.admantx.com - support@admantx.com" 2/2500606
54.204.149.66 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:30 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22285 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0 (NetShelter ContentScan, contact abuse@inpwrd.com for information)" 0/680643
54.198.122.232 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:31 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DarkPolitricks+%28Dark+Politricks%29 HTTP/1.1" 200 22220 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) (Contact: backend@getprismatic.com)" 0/650482
64.49.241.208 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:32 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22284 "-" "ScooperBot www.customscoop.com" 0/658243
50.16.81.18 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:46 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22283 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0 (NetShelter ContentScan, contact abuse@inpwrd.com for information)" 0/673211
54.166.112.98 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:47 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20DarkPolitricks%20%28Dark%20Politricks%29 HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Recorded Future" 0/1645
54.80.130.191 - - [28/May/2015:17:30:59 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 403 252 "-" "Recorded Future" 0/2777
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:31:35 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22282 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/606530
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:33:05 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22283 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/490218
54.208.89.59 - - [28/May/2015:17:34:31 +0100] "HEAD /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "-" 0/309191
54.208.89.59 - - [28/May/2015:17:34:32 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22281 "-" "-" 0/647914
74.6.254.121 - - [28/May/2015:17:34:35 +0100] "GET /2015/05/study-finds-severe-cold-snap-during-the-geological-age-known-for-its-extreme-greenhouse-climate/ HTTP/1.1" 200 22284 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0/555798

So the moral of the story is this:

• Be careful when you post to Twitter as you will get a rush of traffic to your site in the following minutes which could cause your site problems.
• Try and block social media / brand awareness / spam BOTS if you can so they don't consume your bandwidth and CPU/Memory/
• Use either your servers firewall, or .htaccess file to block BOTS you consider a waste of your money. Remember any HTTP request to your site when you are using a VPS will cost you money. Why waste it on BOTS that provide no benefit to you.
• Try and mitigate the rush by using the Crawl-Delay Robots.txt command to stop the big SERP BOTS from hammering you straight away.

I am sure I will post another Twitter Rush analysis in the coming months and the number of BOTS will have grown from the initial 15+ or so when I first tested it to 200+!

2 Quick Ways To Reduce Traffic On Your System

2 Quick Ways To Reduce Traffic On Your System

By Strictly-Software

Slowing The 3 Major SERP BOTs Down To Reduce Traffic

If you run a site with a lot of pages, good rankings, or a site that tweets out a lot e.g whenever a post comes online then you will probably get most of your traffic from getting crawled by the big 3 crawlers:

I know that whenever I check my access_log on my server to find out the top visiting IP addresses with a command like

grep "Jan/2015" access_log | sed 's/ - -.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | less

I always find the top IP's are the main 3 Search Engines own BOTS (SERP = Search Engine Results Page), so I call their BOTS SERP BOTS.

GoogleBot: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Bing: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Yahoo: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)

Without asking these BOTS to come NOW by doing things like refreshing your sitemap and pinging these SERPS. 

Or tweeting out links then they will crawl your site at their own time and choosing and with nothing to tell them to slow down they will crawl at their own speed. This could be once every second and if so it could cause your site performance issues.

However thing about it logically, if you post a news article or a job advert then in reality it only needs to be crawled once by each SERP BOT for it to be indexed. 

You don't really want it to be crawled every day and on every visit by these BOTS as the content HASN'T changed so there is really no need for the visit.

Now I don't know a way of telling a BOT to only crawl a page only if it's new content or it's changed in some way even if you had a sitemap system that only put in pages that were new or edited as the BOTS will still just vist your site and crawl it.

If you cannot add rel="nofollow" on internal links that point to duplicate content which doesn't actually 100% mean the BOT won't crawl it anyway then there are some things you can try if  you find that your site is having performance problems or is under pressure from heavy loads.

Crawl-Delay

Now this only used to be supported by BingBOT and then some smaller new search engines like Blekko. 

However in recent months after some testing I noticed that all most major SERP BOTS apart from GoogleBOT now obey the command. To get Google to reduce their crawl rate you can use Webmaster Tools to set their crawl rate from the control panel.

For instance on one of my big news sites I have a Crawl-Delay: 25 setting and when I check my access log for those user-agents there is a 25 second (roughly) delay between each request.

Therefore extending this value will reduce your traffic load by the major visitors to your site and is easily done by adding it to your Robot.txt file e.g.

Crawl-delay: 25

Banning IE 6

Now there is no logical reason in the world for any REAL person to be using this user-agent.

This Browser was probably the worst ever Browser in history due to the quirks within it that made web developers jobs so hard. Even just between IE 5.5 and IE 7 there are so many differences with IE 6 and is the reason IE 8 and 9 had all the settings for compatibility modes and browser modes.

It is also the reason IE is going to scrap support for IE 7-9 because of all this hokerery pokery they introduced just to handle the massive differences between IE 6 and their new standard compliant browsers.

Anyone with a Windows computer nowadays should be on at least IE 10. Only if your still on XP and haven't done any Windows Updates since about 5 years ago would you be a real IE 6 user.

Yesterday at work I ran a report on the most used Browsers that day. 

IE 6.0 came 4th!

It was below the 3 SERP BOTS I mentioned earlier and above the latest Chrome version.

On more detailed inspection of my custom logger/defence system that analyses the behaviour of visitors rather than just assuming that because your agent is IE 6 you are actually human could I see these visitors were all BOTS. 

I check for things like whether they could run JavaScript by using JavaScript to log that they can in the same way as I do Flash. These users had no JavaScript or Flash support and the rate they went through pages was way too fast for a human controller.

The only reason I can think people are using this user-agent is because they are script kiddies who have downloaded an old crawling script and the default user-agent is IE 6 and they haven't changed it.

Either they don't have the skill or they are just lazy. However by banning all IE 6 visitors with a simple .htaccess rule like this you can reduce your traffic hugely.

RewriteRule %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (MSIE\s6\.0|MSIE\s5\.0|MSIE\s5\.5) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://127.0.0.1 [L,R=302]

This Rewrite rule bans IE 5, 5.5 and IE 6.0 and sends the crawler back to the localhost on the users machine with a 302  rewrite rule.

No normal person would be using these agents. There maybe some Intranets using VBScript as a client side scripting language from the 90's but no modern site is designed with IE 6 in the designers mind. Therefore most sites you find will not hanlde IE 6 very well therefore like Netscape Navigator they are an old browser so don't worry about site support for it. Therefore by banning it you will find your traffic going down a lot by banning just IE 6 and below.

So two simple ideas to reduce your traffic load. Try them and see how much your site improves.

Twitter Rush caused by Tweet BOTs visiting your site

Twitter Traffic can cause a major hit on your server

If you are using Twitter to post tweets to whenever you blog or post an article you should know that a large number of BOTS will immediately hit your site as soon as they see the link.

This is what I call a Twitter Rush as you are causing a rush of traffic from posting a link on Twitter.

I did a test some months back and I like to regularly test how many hits I get whenever I post a link so that I can weed out the chaff from the wheat and set up rules to ban any BOTS I think are just wasting me money.

Most of these BOTS are also stupid.

If you post the same link to multiple Twitter accounts e.g by using my Wordpress plugin - Strictly Tweetbot then the same BOT will come to the same page multiple times.

Why? Who wrote such crap code and why don't they check before hitting a site that they haven't just crawled that link. I cannot believe the developers at Yahoo cannot write a BOT that works out they have just crawled a page before doing it two more times.

Some BOTS are obviously needed such as the major SERP search engines e.g Google or Bing but many are start up "social media" search engines and other such content scrapers, spammers. hackbots and bandwidth wasters.

Because of this I now 403 a lot of these BOTS or even send them back to the IP address they came from with an ISAPI rewrite rule as they don't provide me with any benefit and just steal bandwidth and cost me money.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (?:Spider|MJ12bot|seomax|atomic|collect|e?mail|magnet|reaper|tools\.ua\.random|siphon|sweeper|harvest|(?:microsoft\surl\scontrol)|wolf) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://%{REMOTE_ADDR} [L,R=301]

However if you are using my Strictly Tweet BOT plugin which can post multiple tweets to the same or multiple accounts then the new version allows you to pre-post a page which hopefully gets cached by the caching plugin you should be using (WP SUPER CACHE or W3 TOTAL CACHE etc) before the article is made public and the BOT looking at Twitter for URL's to scrape can get to it.

The aim is to get the page cached BEFORE multiple occurrences of BOTS hit the page. If the page is already cached then the load on your server should be a lot less than if every BOT's loading of the page was trying to cache the page at the same time (due to the quickness of their visit). 

However if you are auto blogging and using my TweetBOT you might be interested in Strictly TweetBOT PRO as it had extra features for people who are tweeting to multiple accounts or multiple tweet in different formats to the same account. These new features are all designed to reduce the hit from a Twitter Rush.

The paid for version allows you to do the following:

• Make an HTTP request to the new post before Tweeting anything. If you have a caching plugin on your site then this should put the new post into the cache so that when the Twitter Rush comes they all hit a cached page and not a dynamically created one.
• Add a query-string to the URL of the new post when making an HTTP request to aid caching. Some plugins like WP Super Cache allow you to force an uncached page to be loaded with a querystring. So this will enable the new page to be loaded and re-cached.
• Delay tweeting for N seconds after making the HTTP request to cache your post. This will help you ensure that the post is in the cache before the Twitter Rush.
• Add a delay between each Tweet that is sent out. If you are tweeting to multiple accounts you will cause multiple Twitter Rushes. Therefore staggering the hits aids performance.

I did a test this morning to see how much traffic was generated by a test post. I got almost 50 responses within 2 seconds!

50.18.132.28 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:41 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "bitlybot"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
50.57.137.74 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "EventMachine HttpClient"
184.72.47.46 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
204.236.150.14 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:44 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:47 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:48 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
184.72.47.71 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
173.192.79.101 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 471 "-" "-"
50.18.121.55 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "UnwindFetchor/1.0 (+http://www.gnip.com/)"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 369 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
66.228.54.132 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:43 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 106183 "-" "InAGist URL Resolver (http://inagist.com)"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28863 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
65.52.0.229 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
110.169.128.180 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28862 "http://twitter.com/" "User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.18.1"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:15 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.127 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:16 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.131 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
74.112.131.128 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:17 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.0" 200 106203 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:18 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.54.253 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:19 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:28 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
65.52.62.87 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:30 +0000] "GET /2011/11/hypocrisy-rush-drug-test-welfare-benefit-recipients HTTP/1.1" 403 470 "-" "-"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:43 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.165 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:45 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28860 "-" "Twitterbot/1.0"
107.20.160.159 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:59 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "http://unshort.me/about.html"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
199.59.149.31 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:04:46 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:01 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.42.241 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:05:07 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:15 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
107.20.78.114 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:17 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.com"
50.16.51.20 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:06:21 +0000] "HEAD /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Summify (Summify/1.0.1; +http://summify.com)"
74.97.60.113 - - [30/Nov/2011:07:07:11 +0000] "GET /some-test-url-I-posted/ HTTP/1.1" 200 28889 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0"

Apache Performance Tuning BASH Script

BASH Script to tune Apache Configuration Settings

As you might know a lot of the time I think the LAMP / Wordpress combo is a big bag of shite.

There are so many configuration options, at so many different levels that need tuning to get optimal performance, it is a nightmare to find the right information. There is also too many people offering various solutions for Wordpress / Linux / Apache / MySQL configuration.

Different people recommend different sizes for your config values and just trying to link up server load with page/URL/script requests to find out the cause of any performance issue is a nightmare in itself.

I would have thought there would have been a basic tool out there that could log server load, memory, disk swapping over time and then link that up with the MySQL slow query log, Apache error AND access logs so that you could easily tell when you had issues what processes were running, which URL's were being hit and how much activity was going on to identify culprits for tuning. I have even thought of learning PERL just to write one - not that I want to!

Even with all the MySQL tuning possible, caching plugins installed and memory limits on potentially intensive tasks it can be a nightmare to get the best out of a 1GB RAM, 40GB Virtual Server that is constantly hammered by BOTS, Crawlers and humans. I ban over 50% of my traffic and I still get performance issues at various times of the day - why? I have no FXXING idea!

Without throwing RAM at the problem you can try and set your APACHE values in the config file to appropriate values for your server and MPM fork type.

For older versions of Apache the Multi-Processing Module, non-threaded, pre-forking webserver is well suited as long as the configuration is correct. However it can consume lots of memory if not configured correctly.

For newer versions (2+) the Worker MPM is better as each thread handles a connection at a time and this is considered better for high traffic servers due to the smaller memory footprint. However to get PHP working on this setting apparently needs a lot of configuration and you should read up about this before considering a change.

Read about Apache performance tuning here Apache Performance Tuning.

To find out your current apache version from the console run

apache2 -v OR httpd -v (depending on your server type, if you run top and see apache2 threads then use apache2 otherwise use httpd)

You will get something like this.

Server version: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) Server built: Feb 5 2012 21:40:20

To find out your current module configuration from the console run

apache2 -V OR httdp -V

Server version: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian)
Server built: Feb 5 2012 21:40:20
Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:15
Server loaded: APR 1.2.12, APR-Util 1.2.12
Compiled using: APR 1.2.12, APR-Util 1.2.12
Architecture: 64-bit Server
MPM: Prefork threaded: no forked: yes (variable process count)
etc etc etc...

There are lots of people giving "suitable" configuration settings for the various apache settings but one thing you need to do if you run TOP and notice high memory usage and especially high virtual memory usage is try and reduce disk swapping.

I have noticed that when Apache is consuming a lot of memory that your virtual memory (disk based) will be high and you will often experience either high server loads and long wait times for pages to load OR very small server loads e.g 0.01-0.05, an unresponsive website and lots of MySQL Server Gone Away messages in your error log file.

You need to optimise your settings so that disk swapping is minimal which means trying to optimise your MySQL settings using the various MySQL tuning tools I have wrote about as well as working out the right size for your Apache configuration values.

One problem is that if you use up your memory by allowing MySQL to have enough room to cache everything it needs then you can find yourself with little left for Apache. Depending on how much memory each process consumes you can easily find that a sudden spike in concurrent hits uses up all available memory and starts disk swapping.

Therefore apart from MySQL using the disk to carry out OR caching large queries you need to find the right number of clients to allow at any one time. If you allow too many and don't have enough memory to contain them all then the server load will go up, people will wait and the amount of disk swapping will increase and increase until you enter a spiral of doom that only a restart fixes.

It is far better to allow fewer connections and serve them up quickly with a small queue and less waiting than open too many for your server to handle and create a massive queue with no hope of ending.

One of the things you should watch out for is Twitter Rushes caused by automatically tweeting your posts to twitter accounts as this can cause 30-50 BOTS to hit your site at once. If they all consume your memory up then it can cause a problem that I have wrote about before.

Working out your MaxClients value

To work out the correct number of clients to allow you need to do some maths and to help you I have created a little bash script to do this.

What it does is find out the average size of an Apache thread then restarts Apache so that the correct "free size" value can be obtained.

It then divides the remainder by the Apache process size. The value you get should be roughly the right value for your MaxClients.

It will also show you how much disk swapped or virtual memory you are using as well as the size of your MySQL process.

I noticed on my own server that when it was under-performing I was using twice as much disk space as RAM. However when I re-configured my options and gave the system enough RAM to accommodate all the SQL / APACHE processes then it worked fine with low swapping.

Therefore if your virtual memory is greater than the size of your total RAM e.g if you are using 1.5GB of hard disk space as virtual memory and only have 1GB of RAM then it will show an error message.

Also as a number of Apache tuners claim that your MinSpareServers should be 10-25% of your MaxClients value and your MaxSpareServers value 25-50% of your MaxClientsValue I have also included the calculations for these settings as well.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Calculate MaxClients by dividing biggest Apache thread by free memory"
if [ -e /etc/debian_version ]; then
 APACHE="apache2"
elif [ -e /etc/redhat-release ]; then
 APACHE="httpd"
fi
APACHEMEM=$(ps -aylC $APACHE |grep "$APACHE" |awk '{print $8'} |sort -n |tail -n 1)
APACHEMEM=$(expr $APACHEMEM / 1024)
SQLMEM=$(ps -aylC mysqld |grep "mysqld" |awk '{print $8'} |sort -n |tail -n 1)
SQLMEM=$(expr $SQLMEM / 1024)
echo "Stopping $APACHE to calculate the amount of free memory"
/etc/init.d/$APACHE stop &> /dev/null
TOTALFREEMEM=$(free -m |head -n 2 |tail -n 1 |awk '{free=($4); print free}')
TOTALMEM=$(free -m |head -n 2 |tail -n 1 |awk '{total=($2); print total}')
SWAP=$(free -m |head -n 4 |tail -n 1 |awk '{swap=($3); print swap}')
MAXCLIENTS=$(expr $TOTALFREEMEM / $APACHEMEM)
MINSPARESERVERS=$(expr $MAXCLIENTS / 4)
MAXSPARESERVERS=$(expr $MAXCLIENTS / 2)
echo "Starting $APACHE again"
/etc/init.d/$APACHE start &> /dev/null
echo "Total memory $TOTALMEM"
echo "Free memory $TOTALFREEMEM"
echo "Amount of virtual memory being used $SWAP"
echo "Largest Apache Thread size $APACHEMEM"
echo "Amount of memory taking up by MySQL $SQLMEM"
if [[ SWAP > TOTALMEM ]]; then
      ERR="Virtual memory is too high"
else
      ERR="Virtual memory is ok"
fi
echo "$ERR"
echo "Total Free Memory $TOTALFREEMEM"
echo "MaxClients should be around $MAXCLIENTS"
echo "MinSpareServers should be around $MINSPARESERVERS"
echo "MaxSpareServers should be around $MAXSPARESERVERS"

If you get 0 for either of the last two values then consider increasing your memory or working out what is causing your memory issues. Either that or set your MinSpareServers to 2 and MaxSpareServers to 4.

There are many other settings which you can find appropriate values for but adding indexes to your database tables and ensuring your database table/query caches can fit in memory rather than swapped to disk is a good way to improve performance without having to resort to more caching at all the various levels Wordpress/Apache/Linux users love doing.

If you do use a caching plugin for Wordpress then I would recommend tuning it so that it doesn't cause you problems.

At first I thought WP SuperCache was a solution and pre-caching all my files would speed things up due to static HTML being served quicker than PHP.

However I found that the pre-cache stalled often, caused lots of background queries to rebuild the files which consumed memory and also took up lots of disk space.

If you are going to pre-cache everything then hold the files as long as possible as if they don't change there seems little point in deleting and rebuilding them every hour or so and using up SQL/IO etc.

I have also turned off gzip compression in the plugin and enabled it at Apache level. It seems pointless doing it twice and PHP will use more resources than the server.

The only settings I have enabled in WP-Super-Cache at the moment are:

• Don’t cache pages with GET parameters. (?x=y at the end of a url) 
• Cache rebuild.
• Serve a supercache file to anonymous users while a new file is being generated. 
• Extra homepage checks. (Very occasionally stops homepage caching)
• Only refresh current page when comments made. 
• Cache Timeout is set to 100000 seconds (why rebuild constantly?)
• Pre-Load - disabled.

Also in the Rejected User Agents box I have left it blank as I see no reason NOT to let BOTS like googlebot create cached pages for other people to use. As bots will most likely be your biggest visitor it seems odd to not let these BOTS create cached files.

So far this has given me some extra performance.

Hopefully the tuning I have done tonight will help the issue I am getting of very low server loads, MySQL gone away errors and high disk swapping. I will have to wait and see!

Analysing Bot Traffic from a Twitter Rush

Twitter Rush - Bot Traffic from Twitter

I blogged the other day about a link I found that listed the traffic that visits a site whenever a link to that site is posted upon twitter.

It seems that if you post a Tweet that contains a link a Twitter Rush is caused due to numerous BOTS, Social Media sites, SERPS and other sites noticing the new link and then all visiting your site at the same time.

This is one reason I created Strictly TweetBOT PRO which differs from my free version of Strictly TweetBOT as it allows you to do the following:

• Make an HTTP request to the new post before Tweeting anything. If you have a caching plugin on your site then this should put the new post into the cache so that when the Twitter Rush comes they all hit a cached page and not a dynamically created one.
• Add a query-string to the URL of the new post when making an HTTP request to aid caching. Some plugins like WP Super Cache allow you to force an un-cached page to be loaded with a query-string. So this will enable the new page to be loaded and re-cached.
• Delay tweeting for N seconds after making the HTTP request to cache your post. This will help you ensure that the post is in the cache before the Twitter Rush.
• Add a delay between each Tweet that is sent out. If you are tweeting to multiple accounts you will cause multiple Twitter Rushes. Therefore staggering the hits aids performance.

I have been carrying out performance tests on one of my LAMP sites and have been analysing this sort of data in some depth. I thought I would post an update with the actual traffic my own site receives when a link is Tweeted which is below.

A few interesting points:

1. This traffic is instantaneous so that the first item in the log file visiting the site has exactly the same time stamp as the WordPress URL that submitted the tweets to my Twitter account.

2. Yahoo seems to duplicate requests. This one tweet to a single post resulted in 3 requests for Yahoo's Slurp BOT but they originated from two different IP addresses.

3. These bots are not very clever and don't seem to log the URL's they visit to prevent duplicate requests. Not only does Yahoo have issues with the same account but if you post the same link to multiple Twitter accounts you will get all this traffic for each account.

For example when I posted the same link to 3 different Twitter accounts I received 57 requests (19 * 3). You would think maybe these Bots would be clever enough to realise that they only need to visit a link once every so often no matter which account posted it.

It just serves to prove my theory that most Twitter traffic is BOT related. 

BOTS following BOTS and Re-Tweeting and following traffic generated by other BOTS.

• 128.242.241.133 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:45 +0000] "HEAD /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
• 216.24.142.47 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:47 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.0" 200 26644 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 OneRiot/1.0 (http://www.oneriot.com)"
• 204.236.254.109 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:48 +0000] "HEAD /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
• 67.195.112.56 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:46 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.0" 200 100253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
• 72.30.142.220 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:47 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.0" 200 100253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
• 65.52.2.10 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:49 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 26643 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
• 85.114.136.243 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:49 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 26634 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 6.0) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 NjuiceBot"
• 72.30.142.220 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:49 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.0" 200 100253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
• 89.151.113.134 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:49 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 100253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.0) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 TweetmemeBot"
• 67.202.63.158 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:54 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 26634 "-" "kame-rt (support@backtype.com)"
• 38.113.234.180 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:06:57 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 100253 "-" "Voyager/1.0"
• 74.112.128.61 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:03 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.0" 200 100253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Butterfly/1.0; +http://labs.topsy.com/butterfly/) Gecko/2009032608 Firefox/3.0.8"
• 64.233.172.20 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:10 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 26640 "-" "AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine; appid: mapthislink)"
• 208.94.147.190 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:17 +0000] "HEAD /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "http://longurl.org" "LongURL API"
• 208.94.147.190 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:17 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 100253 "http://longurl.org" "LongURL API"
• 66.249.65.166 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:25 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 200 26653 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
• 64.12.237.17 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:07:32 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 403 455 "-" "Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1"
• 204.236.205.4 - - [29/Sep/2010:21:08:55 +0000] "HEAD /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 403 - "-" "Firefox"
• 67.207.201.163 - - [29/Sep/2010:17:01:06 +0000] "GET /2010/09/capital-punishment-and-law-and-order/ HTTP/1.1" 403 473 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; mxbot/1.0; +http://www.chainn.com/mxbot.html)"