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Several months ago the ChipGuide was performing very poorly and users could not access the website. That initiated a study to determine the cause of the performance problems. Initially, we found that a certain feature being used to display images with the correct aspect ratio was the culprit as it had to load each image to determine its dimensions. That was taken care of quickly, with a temporary solution, at least until the image library is upgraded. Until then, some images may not display correctly.
It was further determined that a lot, perhaps 50%, of the website traffic was from "bots". Bots are programs that visit websites to extract information. Some bots are good, like the GOOGLE bot - a search engine, that catalog website content so that users can easily find it. But there are also bad bots. Some marketing companies run bots to extract website data and then sell it to interested parties. Some bots are out to steal website content. The worst bots are looking for website weaknesses that can be exploited, to be malicious or for extortion.
A website tool is now being used daily to monitor ChipGuide website traffic. Literally 100's of bots visit the ChipGuide daily. Most are benign and do a couple of requests and leave. The bad bots are identified and banned from the website. The list of bad bots grows daily. Some of the worst bots cannot be banned because they don't identify themselves correctly. However, based on analysis of their website requests, for example some are looking for weaknesses in WordPress websites, they can be identified and banned by their IP address.
When you ban a IP address, it bans everyone in that vicinity, and may include some legitimate users. If you get a message "403 - Forbidden", when trying to access the ChipGuide, your IP address was caught up with a bad bot. If that happens, just email me and it can be fixed.
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