How does BotBanish Work?

Started by Randem, September 23, 2017, 04:21:33 PM

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Randem

BotBanish is a bot / spider / user monitoring system that will monitor behaviors that are bad for your website, forum or shopping cart. If BotBanish determines that a monitored behavior is bad BotBanish will block the user from the whole hosting site. Monitored bad behavior is considered to be multiple attempts at breaching security, making too many requests on your site in a short period of time or known bad bots / spiders / users.

BotBanish only blocks bots / spiders / users that actually attack your system, when they attack your system. With this type of monitoring BotBanish can adjust to changing behaviors and signatures of the bots / spiders / users. They can change IP addresses but BotBanish will recognize them the same and block them too.

BotBanish usage is for one domain per APIKEY, so the first time you use BotBanish with an APIKEY, the domain will be logged and will only work with that domain. If you do not have an APIKEY then you are running in the 'DEMO' mode and may not have full use of the features. Contact us on http://botbanish.com for an APIKEY for your domain. The demo mode will have a limited number of uses that can be registered or BOTs that can be blocked. Once we lockout a bot / spider / user from your system it will no longer be considered a hit because it will not actually be attacking your site anymore.

When a BOT / Spider / User is locked out BotBanish will send the administrator an email to let them know the details of the lockout. Any errors that are presented will be created in a folder named 'logs' in the root folder.

If your .htaccess file in the root of your domain is not accessible for BotBanish to modify, your usage of BotBanish can be terminated without advanced notice.

Upon first usage of BotBanish; it may take some time for BotBanish to recognize the particular bots that hit your site. All sites are not hit by the same type of bots, so even though we may lockout some bots immediately, others may take a little time to learn their behavior.

One of the first things that you may notice is that BotBanish does not have a user interface; this is by design (SMF is the exception). No one should be making changes to the system unless they really know what they are doing. Having no user interface discourages experimental user changes that could disable you from accessing your website / forum.