can anyone help me identify a mystery visitor?

[flunn]

I have a English as a Second Language site, flesl.net. Traffic has recently been averaging about 170 hits a day. Until yesterday the most hits I'd ever had in one day was 525 at the beginning of the school year, last September.

In the last twelve hours or so, however I've had an unprecedented surge of traffic — at least six hundred hits, almost all of them apparently from the same source. (I can't be sure of this because my log size is only one hundred.)

This is fine with me of course, but I'm a bit frustrated. I like to know roughly at least who my visitors are, or at least where they are. But the StatsCounter reports on these visits give no information about the visitor's country,region, city or ISP. The host name is given as ip-190-83-17-125.coldecon.com. By googling this, and using a site I ran into (but don't really understand) called SenderBase I've got the impression the visits are coming from somewhere in Latin America, perhaps Colombia, but this is just a guess really.

Any comments or advice as to how I might identify the mystery visitor would be much appreciated.

regards to all

[Brisguy52]

Howdy flunn

Here's a whois on that IP addy.
We get a few spammers in this forum from this IP range.


WhoIs Lookup performed by Karen's WhoIs
http://www.karenware.com/
OrgName: Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry
OrgID: LACNIC
Address: Rambla Republica de Mexico 6125
City: Montevideo
StateProv:
PostalCode: 11400
Country: UY
ReferralServer: whois://whois.lacnic.net
NetRange: 190.0.0.0 - 190.255.255.255

[flunn]

Thanks to BrisGuy for his answer to my post. I don't have the Whois software he used but did check later with an online Whois and once again found that the hits seem to be coming from Colombia (Bogota?). Interesting his software would come up with something on the other side of the same continent.

I was also interested in BrisGuy's reference to spam.

Did he mean to imply that a barrage of hits on a website could be a sort of spam? And if so, what would its purpose be?

Another question that's occurred to me: why sometimes is there no indication on StatsCounter of where a visit is coming from?

[trackerm]

Give them a ring and ask them:

Administrative Contact:
contact, technical tec_domains@coldecon.com
coldecon s.a.
calle 99# 41-59
bogota, 1005
co
+57.16187111
+57.16187182

Technical Contact:
sandoval muoz, luis eduardo gerente@continental.com.co
cra 1e # 71a 49
cali, *
co
+57.24401442
+57.24058755



Do you get students from South America? If its all from one IP address it may be some information that a school in Colombia has found and disseminated to their students etc. It may just be some spam type thing in which case you can deny all hits using .htaccess

Using http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx

[flunn]

Very interesting. But I won't phone because I don't speak Spanish and even if did, I suppose I'd just be contacting the host of whoever it was who visited my site and it'd look like I was spying or, at least complaining. Anyway I haven't had any more visits so I guess it wasn't spam.
I was also interested in the reference to .htaccess. I've been trying to avoid having to figure out what it is. Now I guess I have to.

regards from flunn

[flunn]

I should have added to that last post that if it was, as Trackerm suggested, a matter of a school in Colombia disseminating information to their students, that's fine with me. Exactly what I want.

It's just that it's frustrating not knowing who they are or how they're using the materials—let alone being able to get in touch with them.

flunn

[webado]

Originally Posted by flunn

Thanks to BrisGuy for his answer to my post. I don't have the Whois software he used but did check later with an online Whois and once again found that the hits seem to be coming from Colombia (Bogota?). Interesting his software would come up with something on the other side of the same continent.

I was also interested in BrisGuy's reference to spam.

Did he mean to imply that a barrage of hits on a website could be a sort of spam? And if so, what would its purpose be?

Another question that's occurred to me: why sometimes is there no indication on StatsCounter of where a visit is coming from?

Every whois application has it's own favorite database where they look things up.

I'd stick to one: www.whois.sc .

[fuzzy]

Hey Chris, you might want to have a look at that URL...

[NeilB]

I regularly get 100s of pageloads from the same IP address. These are normally schools where kids are on a network but it shows as one IP address on statcounter.
Depends whether you are talking about individual visits or pageloads when you mention 'hits'.

Cheers
Neil

[webado]

Originally Posted by fuzzy

Hey Chris, you might want to have a look at that URL...

Grrr... it's the full WYSIWYG editor messing all up. I'll get rid of it. I forget why I enabled that in my user CP in the first place.