What is abuse?

You might think this is a strange subject for a traffic exchange.  Especially if you are running an auto surf.  But here's what can happen if you don't keep your eye on it:-

1. Your host shuts your site down because your site is responsible for utilising too many resources (good ones say 25% cpu for 30 seconds or more and no more than 5% average over a period of an hour, typically you will see 15% over 10 seconds and not more than 2% over an hour).
2. Your members get fed up with slow performance and move over to your competitor.
3. Your Bandwidth bill increases your low cost $4.99/month hosting to $4.99 + $149 for extra bandwidth (this is not an imaginary figure, it actually happened).
4. A MySQL database can grow from a few megabytes to several gigabytes over a few days leaving your site inoperable because you have hit your diskspace allocation.
5. Your entire disk space allocation can be consumed in less than an hour by log data.

Nice problem to have if you are just starting your exchange but typically this will only begin to happen as your site becomes popular.  It's the absolute worse time for it to happen, just as surfers see your site has potential it get's killed either by performance issues or your host suspends it for one of the reasons mentioned above.  Not good.

Abuse is traffic that offers you zero benefits.  As a traffic exchange owner you need to sell advertising that can benefit your members.  If that traffic is of no benefit to them then all it manages to achieve is a higher bandwidth bill or hosting plan requirement for both of you.  The reason it's abuse and not just "unwanted traffic" is the people responsible rarely care about your income or the income of your members.  Here's a few reasons why they do it:-

1. They want to advertise something and they don't want to pay anything for your service.  They think by setting up an autoclicker (a program that allows you to surf up to 50 TE's at once, popular with LJ and TCN scripts but blocked by Ventrino scripts) they can generate hunreds of thousands of free traffic to their own sites.  The reality is those TE's that allow these applications are plagued by them and the only people to benefit are the electricity, ISP and hosting companies. 
2. Do you offer cash incentives?  Does your site suggest money can be made?  There are lots of developing countries where non English speaking people understand "make money" and other related terms that appear to have no real understanding of a TE - except it is easy to use.  These people can be responsible for enourmous amounts of traffic.  Worse still there are reports of "digital workshops" where for a couple of dollars a month the elderly and young are used to click all day long.
3. Competition.  Sad but true, there are a growing number of vandals prepared to bring your site down as soon as they sniff success.  The anonymity of the Internet has created a playground for anyone with a chip on their shoulder.  The Walker/Ventrino is a large and happy community but your success will attract the attention of those who do not like the fact you are "stealing business from them".  The success of your site will attract revenge attacks but these are easy to detect and block with the following instructions.

How to prevent abuse

Fortunately what works in favour of the bad guys also benefits the good guys.  Each time they surf that information is logged in several places:-

• Your web statistics
• In the database
• In the web logs
• Your bandwidth graphs

Don't be fooled by the 24 hour surfers list.  It may seem like an even and reasonable spread but it's impossible to detect the same person setting up multiple accounts, it happens and on busy exchanges many dozens of accounts are often created by a single individual.

Check entries 6 and 7 in the General Maintenance & Assistance section of the videos.  These demonstrate an easy way block the two most common forms of abuse.

To identify abuse open your stats program and look for the Hosts To 25 (the name will vary between stats programs) and it will looks something like this:-

In this example we have a single IP address responsible for 80,453 page views and 99,224 hits.  That means this surfer is viewing just 1.2 files (80453/99224) per surf.  In other words they are cheating.  As you probably know by now the surfbar accounts for less that 1k but it is in a frame, and that frame requires 3 files downloaded and if you use any images on the surfbar such as the multi colored buttons or a banner then the total increases to at least 8.  So for 99,224 hits this IP address should have a page count between 12,403 and 33,074 pages.  Chances are this particular IP is responsible for pushing your website close to it's cpu maximum and your hosting provider may ask you to move it soon!

Before we finish with this IP let's contemplate what they are actually doing.  If we ignore the fact they are cheating, is it possible they have surfed 80,453 pages in 13 days?  On Ventrino hosting the shortest timer allowed is 10 seconds, others limit it to 20 seconds, so let's take an average of 15.

Here's the math:

80,453 x 15 seconds = 1,206,795 seconds

That 's equal to 335 hours of surfing or 14 days!!!  The owner of this IP address is claiming they have sat at their PC without a break surfing your website for two weeks.  If you are running an auto surf you might think this is ok but consider your hosting costs, this guy will be pushing you up to the next plan or you may find your host doesn't want your business, but you are not the only person he's hurting, what about the business whose pages he is surfing and not seeing? Somone has to pay that hosting bill too.

But I don't see this surfer or anyone getting that many credits?  How is this possible?

Fortunately the program catches this kind of behaviour and blocks them from earning credits and more importantly stops other members from losing their credits.  Because of this they don't even enter the competition figures, their surf count is never added.  The irony is they are too stupid to notice and some of these guys will go on for months before giving up.  Perhaps that's the nature of cheats, they are too lazy to open the guilded box to see if anything of value is inside. Have you ever had someone send you a support ticket saying "Hey, I have been surfing for HOURS and your site isn't crediting my account"  and this is usually followed up with some expletive and comment regarding your business integrity.  That's right, they have the affrontery to steal from you and then criticise you when they discover the goods they stole are useless to them!

Their surfing is useless to them and it merely waste your bandwidth.  Get rid of them!

Now I know the IP address, what do I do next?

Check the videos mentioned above if you need to see the process step by step, but in short do this:-

1. Login to your cPanel control panel (if you use a different control panel seek assistance from your host).
2. Select the IP Deny Manager
3. Follow the instructions to add the IP and block it.  Note that you can cover a whole network by adding a partial address.  For example, if you want to ban 11.12.13.14 you can ban the whole class C network (254 IP's) by just adding 11.12.13. and leaving off the 14.

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