Hello, for a couple of days, we've had many "Guests" all over the forum whose IPs all stem from compute.hwclouds-dns.com. Apparently from Kowloon, Hong Kong. Guests do have access to our forum, though they cannot post. An internet search of the IPs brings up all sorts of info: spammers, site crawling for info with disregard to robots.txt instructions... along those lines. Should I be worried?

You don’t really need to be worried about them “hacking” anything. If you’re worried about them crawling your site or if they’re taking up too much resources on your server… or if you see those IPs end up being spammers you can use a firewall of some kind to block their IP ranges. 

Edited February 3, 20241 yr by Randy Calvert

I think at times about 30-40% of the traffic we got had IPs related to that above. My feeling is that they were/are "parked" in different forum sections for hours or days on end. My guess would be that they're there to feed off the info as soon as it's entered, but it beats me as to why anyone would want that.  I was indeed considering blocking the IP range, though as I understand it that won't cut it if someone really wants in.

That’s basically the situation. Only you can decide what to do based on the impact it creates for you or your community and if the effort is worth it. 

Thanks Randy. Marc S. from Support just confirmed they are likely to be crawlers, as you said. Also, I could not block them if I wanted to, so I guess I just chill...

Edited February 5, 20241 yr by I_cant_Swim_