Re: Who is denomicated as \"Anomymous\"? on Who\'s Online
Threads makes the on-line entry prior to transferring control to the "myhome" script. Once the "myhome" script begins execution, it performs user validation. If the validation fails, the script displays an error page but performs no additional logging to the "online" table. The "myhome" entry continues to be displayed for ten minutes.
It does seem strange that the one Asian spider that is purportedly well behaved was attempting to execute the page numerous times.
I suggest we investigate this further and see what develops. Currently, the Asian site is blocked. Let's unblock the site and see if the spider returns. If it does, I will add logic to provide transparent detailed logging of the script. This would include the incoming parameters and the data actually returned.
The online page has in my opinion a perception issue. It shows all accesses for the past ten minutes. While the crawl rate has been defined as sixty seconds, even a well behaved spider might appear as many as ten times on a single snapshot of the online data. Part of the issue is that the spider will normally cycle through a list of IP address. Since each anonymous access is logged by IP address, it appears there are numerous spiders "attacking" the site.
The page does not represent current connections but simply connections in the past ten minutes. Since the page data (or the access denied page) is returned in seconds, the result is a fair amount of "noise" in the anonymous section of the on-line page.
Securing the scripts is an on-going battle. Perhaps by investigating this issue, we can improve the data provided by the site.
