A Semi automated way to note the IP addresses of things viewing us

[DocAElstein]

Update January 2025

The Chinese Bots started fucking with us big time, at Xmas 2025, (like their friends the Russians did back then in Stalingrad, a surprise attack, but I caught it).
They paralysed permanently the forum, ( - meaning permanent errors so no chance to access the forum) thy did this to the forum for a few hours, so not as bad as back in June, 2025, when it was over a few days, but never the less the worse since that time, June, 2025.
Since that attack, it has calmed down considerably, meaning there are no detected, (by me), periods of being permanently paralysed.
Also, since that attack, the Bots actual activity has been very varied, but we can see perhaps a slight new strategy in that we have had an increase in some short term very high views that catch a few errors. I have not always caught them all, as I was busy concluding some final river railway activities ( https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...y-2025-*/page8
https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...-2025-*/page14
As of the end of January I am able to keeping a better watch, so I am )

This change in strategy by the Chinese Bots this year, makes it even harder for my primitive coding to get a good quick snap shot of what is going on, that is to say the Semi automated way to note the IP addresses of things viewing is already not really a snap shot, and it cannot catch too well a lot of high short viewing periods, and as I likely have more files to later transfer to the summary file, it all gets a bit more annoyingly time consuming for me.
The main reason for coding, at least VBA coding for the home user, is to do tedious stuff so we can get on with something better, so I am thinking it is time for me to make at least an attempt for a bit of an update to try and improve things.
I am mainly concerned here and in the next few posts in updating the file
IPAddressesWatchingExcelFox_Refresh.xls


Quick reminder of what I do, ( as before https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...ll=1#post27604 )

At least once a day, (unless I forget), I open the file IPAddressesWatchingExcelFox_Refresh.xls and run the coding
Sub GetRefreshesIPAddressWatchingThingsAtExcelFox()
, (having hardcoded the number of refreshes, En. The number En is given as the number of pages in Who's online page,
http://www.excelfox.com/forum/online.php
https://postimg.cc/Hj0tKhXj , https://i.postimg.cc/MZNrckG0/pages-of-online.jpg
, which is approximate the
( number of Views )
------------------
_____20
, since most pages show 20 lines of view data.
( previous experimenting had shown that refreshing as many times as there are pages gives similar results as selecting each page )
If the bots seem to be doing different things in the same day, as they have been increasingly since Xmas, then I try to catch that by doing the run more times in a day.
I save the file as
IPAddressesWatchingExcelFox_Refresh________.xls
, where the ________ bit is some extra distinguishing bit, usually the date and some other thing about what appears to have been going on.

Then once in a while, I go through the last few files and run some coding, (in the worksheet Stats code module), of file .
I run 3 ( sometimes 4 ) codings in the following sequential order:
Sub RequestsOrdering()
Sub IPsSaniierung()
Sub UnknownLocationsTotheSummaryFile()
That coding puts some information in a summary file
SummaryRequestsIPsDailys.xlsm
, which simply has all the results from each file sequentially in the order done. ( Approximately the three worksheets in that file, ( SummaryRequestsIPsDailys.xlsm ) , are correspond to each of those three codings, but it is not quite as simple as that as the first code does most of the work for all worksheets, and the other two do some reordering/ sanitising before passing respectively the info they specifically deal with. )

(finally , and only if necessary I do an additional coding that is in that summary file,
Sub ReCheckDuplicates() )
(This last coding my be necessary as the .Find used as part of the coding to remove duplicates dos not work for untypically long, and maybe a few other things in .Find as it is a bit quirky. (This coding needs be here as the last thing Sub UnknownLocationsTotheSummaryFile() does is to close the file IPAddressesWatchingExcelFox_Refresh________.xls )



At some later time I use another file, SummaryRequestsIPsAlls(Merge)B.xlsm to try and group results from similar trends or similar activity of the Bots

Here is another set of the above summary stuff, in a bit more detail including the actual files and coding used so far
https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...ll=1#post27603
https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...ll=1#post27604
https://www.excelfox.com/forum/showt...ll=1#post27606








So…,
I am mainly making changes here in the file
IPAddressesWatchingExcelFox_Refresh.xls

So in the next posts I will talk about the main changes I have made around this time, (mid –end, January 2026)