Security or hacking issues ?

[CJPinder]

>teamzr1 said...
>As seen the super high daily counts show no change between versions .7 and .8a
>Counter History for last 10 recorded days Session - Total
>09/11/2008 204 - 241
>09/10/2008 139 - 159
>09/09/2008 414 - 470

You should ignore the Counter History in the Zen Cart admin section. It does not work properly due to a long standing bug in Zen Cart. Every time a search engine spider looks at one of your pages the sessions counter will go up by one. This causes the figures to be vastly over inflated.

Regards,
Christian.

Ref: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63121

[teamzr1]

Thanks Christian for confirming what I suspected as to search engines and spiders/robots

Any ideas what could be put in a robot.txt that could reduce this ?

Something like ? :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /public_html/fstore/

[Website Rob]

Admin > Configuration > Sessions
Prevent Spider Sessions - true

Try the above setting and see if that helps.

[DrByte]

With respect to Christian's comment about counters vs spiders, see this thread: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63121

[teamzr1]

Admin > Configuration > Sessions
Prevent Spider Sessions - true

Try the above setting and see if that helps.

I checked that and it is set to TRUE and has been as a default

[teamzr1]

With respect to Christian's comment about counters vs spiders, see this thread: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63121

I added the code as you posted in that thread so now will have to wait a few days and see if the counts are much lower then as of this Saturday AM
This will work when prevent spider sessions is set to TRUE ?

Counter History for last 10 recorded days Session - Total
09/13/2008 62 - 62
09/12/2008 123 - 216
09/11/2008 218 - 255
09/10/2008 139 - 159
09/09/2008 414 - 470
09/08/2008 389 - 412
09/07/2008 215 - 313
09/06/2008 174 - 177
09/05/2008 144 - 165
09/04/2008 368 - 402

[teamzr1]

Well the "who is online" is showing ( spider allowed in doing a crawl :-(
at the search page


00:02:23 0 ¥Spider 66.249.67.106 10:29:00 10:29:15
Time Since Clicked:
00:02:08 ago Session ID:
Host: crawl-66-249-67-106.googlebot.com
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
/fstore/index.php?main_page=advanced_search&keyword=interface&search_in_description=1&in c_subcat=0&sort=20a&alpha_filter_id=83

[Kim]

Why are you so worried about the spiders? You need them to get your pages in the search engines?

[CJPinder]

@teamzr1...
You should apply the fix that DrByte posted in the above mentioned thread. Also check that in Admin > Configuration >Sessions you have the following set...
Force Cookie Use: False
Prevent Spider Sessions: True

Doing the above three things will ensure that spiders do not add to the session counter on the admin page. They will still crawl your site and you'll still see them in Who's Online and that is fine.

Regards,
Christian.

[teamzr1]

Force cookie use is set to false and prevent spider sessions is set to true
and the code change was done but
still seeing sessions that are supposed to be blocked ?

00:13:26 0 ¥Spider 66.249.67.106 11:35:10 11:36:43
Time Since Clicked:
00:11:53 ago Session ID:
Host: crawl-66-249-67-106.googlebot.com
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
/fstore/index.php?main_page=advanced_search&keyword=interface&search_in_description=1&in c_subcat=0&sort=20a&alpha_filter_id=74

00:05:50 0 ¥Spider 61.247.222.55 11:42:46 11:42:46
Time Since Clicked:
00:05:50 ago Session ID:
Host: 61.247.222.55
User Agent: Yeti/1.0 (NHN Corp.; http://help.naver.com/robots/)

---------------

As to the question why focusing in on this ?

Well when you see high daily counts, zero real users, what visitors you do see are from other countires and not your own then you have to suspect, play it save and determine the WHYs.

When your customers who have their private info from past purchases are in Zen Cart then clearly we need to know the end results, 20/20 hindsight is one thing but not knowing the WHYs is not good enough with customer information or someone hacking and using our domain by some backdoor into the frontstore ? ? ?