1000s of 'fake' views on my blog from a bot

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  barleymania · Member · Mar 27, 2017 at 2:26 pm

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  Hey guys,

  Hope you can help me. I’ve been running a small blog for about half a year. On a good day, I have maybe 150 views from 100 individual visitors – most of the time I have less traffic. Today, I already got 2,662 views from 43 visitors. 2,600 of these views happend on my blog’s home page.

  I guess the bulk of these new views comes from a bot or spider that is accessing my blog over and over again. Unfortunately, this messes up my stats and hits counter with traffic that I have not “earned” and that is not real.

  Is there any way to stop this and maybe even reset or readjust my stats?

  I am currently using a free version of WordPress with ads. I already read about a plugin called WordFence and tried to install it, but seem to not be able to do so. Is this because I do not have a paid Personal or Premium account?

  Anyway, hope you guys can help me out here.

  Thanks for your aid & All the best,
  Tobi

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Mar 27, 2017 at 2:49 pm

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  Hi Tobi –

  Thanks for getting in touch. I’ll have a look at barleymania.wordpress.com and post an update once I have more information.

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  barleymania · Member · Mar 27, 2017 at 2:52 pm

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  Great! Thanks a lot in advance for your effort. And fingers crossed there’s an easy way to bar that bot out. :)

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  barleymania · Member · Mar 28, 2017 at 3:33 pm

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  A little update. The unproportionally high amount of views continued to come in till today around 11am. Yesterday, I had 28,880 views from 66 visitors and today I had 7,950 views from 31 visitors. The only (visible) bad effect this left is my messed up stats counter. Is there any chance you’d correct this by hand and substract all views on my blog’s home page from the total number of views for March 28 and 27? Thanks & fingers crossed I’ll be spared another flood of bot-produced views.

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Mar 28, 2017 at 7:01 pm

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  Thank you for the details. I’ll post back here once I have more news to share.

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Mar 31, 2017 at 4:26 pm

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  We are still working on this and I didn’t want you to think we had forgotten about you :)

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  barleymania · Member · Apr 11, 2017 at 11:10 am

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  Thanks for the feedback. In the past (almost) two weeks, everything was normal. So March 27, 28 and 29 remain the only “affected” days. If there’s any way to adjust these days by hand (or just set the counter to zero for these days), it would be really great. They still mess up the views graphics as all other days are dwarfed to thin lines while these three days stand towering.

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Apr 11, 2017 at 7:17 pm

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  I’m looking in to this for you. I see it has created quite the skewed graph.

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  barleymania · Member · Apr 18, 2017 at 7:49 am

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  Yes. Unfortunately, the peak from the fake views renders the whole graph useless, because all normal days are just thin lines compared to those three days that stick out. Also, I cannot display my views on my front page anymore as the number is obviously not right. Fingers crossed, you can get this sorted out. :)

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  barleymania · Member · Apr 28, 2017 at 2:48 pm

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  Checking in again to see if there’s any news on this… any chance you guys can access the database by hand and zeroize the values for March 27, 28 and 29?

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · May 3, 2017 at 3:22 pm

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  Hi –

  Thank you for getting in touch again :)

  Unfortunately this is not possible. We are not able to adjust the stats from the surge days.