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ICB is pretty popular, but not so popular that we should generate about 19GB in traffic per month. About half of this is from spiders and bots from the likes of the major search engines. This month alone, to date, Googlebot has taken up just over 4GB in bandwidth! I'm taking measures to limit what these spiders and bots do, and I can throttle back Googlebot using Google Webmaster tools.

However, the remaining 50% is coming from other unidentified IPs. Some I have been able to trace to other crawl bots, and some are clearly Russians sucking down the content of the site (about 15 times at least in the past month), but some are Irish-based IPs that just seem to display a higher than normal bandwidth usage.

I'm afraid we have to take drastic measures, and I will start blocking IPs that look a little suspicious. What might happen, though, is that a regular user with a lot of time on their hands gets blocked. If this happens, just send a mail to the address that gets displayed and I'll remove that IP.

Even though the Law Library and Bank of Ireland seem to be generating a lot of traffic, I'll leave them be <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt="" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->

I apologise in advance if this interrupts your viewing pleasure <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->

Boards.ie was hacked[/url:2az87tzr] today.

And I'm just after checking Foot.ie, and that seems like it's down too.

Just a heads up. <!-- s:? --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_confused.gif" alt="" title="Confused" /><!-- s:? --> <!-- s:!: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_exclaim.gif" alt="" title="Exclamation" /><!-- s:!: --> <!-- s:!: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_exclaim.gif" alt="" title="Exclamation" /><!-- s:!: --> <!-- s:!: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_exclaim.gif" alt="" title="Exclamation" /><!-- s:!: -->

Thanks, I'll make sure the backups are up to date <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->