Odd One for you guys

badavecom

I'm being honest in saying I don't know if what I am about to ask can be done.

I am new to this site and admit I feel a little guilty just coming into a community to ask for help, but I am urgently wanting to put an end to a problem.

I've designed my site to count hits to pages and recognize unique hits (based on IP Addys) and it's working properly. My problem is that certain pages (particular pages that contain name brand items or popular titles) are getting what I strongly believe are fake hits resulting from massive attempts to spam the site. The recaptcha system stops the spam from ever seeing the light of day, but the hits are still counting which is causing the hit counters on the pages to be totally inaccurate.

I check IP addresses for about 90 different hits to one particular page, the page for Pps Dpndncy (Pepsi Dependency) and about 80 were from outside the US, and of the others--most said Network Sharing Suspected. . .to contrast a normal page on my site gets approximately 98% of it's weekly hits from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia collectively. . clearly an issue when a page gets most of it's hits from India, Brazil, Indonesia & the Middle East.

Spammers never spend more than a second or two on a given page, that I can see from my servers stats, what I was wondering. . .

is their a php function that would allow you to run a part of a script only after a certain amount of seconds have elapsed (say 30 or so) but allow the rest of the page prior to where it's placed run normal as to not affect legitimate visitors to the site? Or any other ideas that anyone has--I would greatly appreciate it. I found ways you can 'not count' certain countries by blocking out certain IP addresses in ranges through MySQL, but the IP system is constantly changing, and even of the 10 or so US hits, some were fake--anyone have any ideas?

coldwerturkey

couldn't you just use html meta refresh tags, set it for thirty seconds and have it refresh to a if block showing the rest of the script?

HalfaBee

You could use javascript to call a counter script after 30 secs.

badavecom

The Meta Refresh tags won't work because it is a music site, and thus refreshing would restart the song. . .

The second idea for Javascript only presents one problem, I need to learn how to do that script. . .I'm out searching, thanks for the ideas, I hope I can learn enough about JavaScript to do that, I'm well versed in PHP (for my purposes) but Javascript was never my forte

badavecom

Ok. . .well. . .everything I found on Javascript is neat, and I think I understand it more than I have in the past. . .but I don't see a script that will wait until after the user sees the page. onLoad actually considers the page loaded before the user sees it apparently because if I use any delay function to do script, it seems to actually wait to show the user the information for the time sent, and still counts it right away once a page is loaded, which doesn't help me, there's gotta be a way, and I'm still researching. . .no one has ever wanted to have a counter that only counts people over a certain duration of time before? Oh well. . .

bpat1434

No, if you look into things like document.ready or window.onload they're supposed to be executed after the DOM is completely loaded. Any JS library (jQuery, Dojo, Prototype) should give you a function to check if the DOM is ready (i.e. page loaded, everything done). You can use that to execute a simple function to sleep for 30 second (or however long) and then call an AJAX query to your PHP server. Just pass some information like IP address of the user to the script. You can insert the IP of the user into a variable from php when the page is created 😉

For example, if I were using jQuery to do this, I'd add this script to my page(s):

<script type="text/javascript"><!-- // --><![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function () {
    sleep(30000);  /* sleep for 30 seconds */
    $.ajax({
        type:"GET",
        url:"myCounter.php"
        data:"ip=<?php echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST']; ?>",
        success:function(msg, status){},
        failure:function(xhr, status, error){},
        complete:function(xhr, status){},
    });
});
// ]]></script>

The last 3 lines (success:, failure:, complete🙂 are just empty functions to make sure that nothing happens when a request finishes. The sleep() function takes milliseconds as it's argument. So 1000 milliseconds = 1 second, 30000 = 30 seconds. You should probably bring this down to like 10 or 15 seconds. I'm usually not on a page for 30 seconds unless I really am interested in the content. But it's up to you. You'll have to tinker with it 😉

badavecom

I'll have to keep playing with that one. . .I changed the url to a code location, and it did stop it from counting right away, but then it never did count it, but I'm going to keep trying it in different ways, thanks. . .I hope I can get it to work.

badavecom

Back on it tomorrow.

I can't get that code to work, I think I'll have to learn Ajax and Javascript to understand how to implement it, maybe that's what I've gotta do, in the mean time I'll just have to put up with inflated statistics (which are messing up the music charts for my visitors) but alas, I can't do anything about the spammers--they aren't able to post, but their hits count unless I can get the counter to only work after time has elapsed. . .

Thanks for trying to help guys, at least it's got me looking in other directions to solve this problem. . .PHP is limited to server side/Javascript to client side. . .it looks like Ajax may be able to bridge the two--but I've gotta figure out what I'm doing wrong with it (since I know nothing about Ajax) to get it to work. My Javascript knowledge is moderate/PHP fairly well versed--all these languages gets confusing for the casual programmer.