[Idea] Not recording "viewing time" by bots

[walt93]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
As an amusing side note, I've read in online forums that Eric Dubay, very popular Flat Earth video maker, is a CIA disinformation operation.

I inadvertently uploaded the most recent Eric Dubay Flat Earth video (deceptively titled), and within 90 minutes, my site was swarmed with thirty bots watching the video over-and-over-and-over, driving that garbage up to #7 of all time on my site before I disabled it.

The bots are continuing to move through the site, on some random journey. They're easy to spot. They do this (check the time, the bot is watching the video at 2X playback speed):

New upload. 3 views. One bot looping...

Describe the solution you'd like

1. Lets stop logging viewing minutes from their IP address after the length of the video is exceeded. When this condition occurs, record IP address/video ID/timestamp in a table, and expire the entry after 24 hours.
2. Let's detect this bot behavior and log their IP address in another table. I'd like to map this bot network and traceroute them. 😈

[DanielnetoDotCom]

As I can see in the code it does not suppose to save bots views

AVideo/objects/videoAddViewCount.json.php

Lines 10 to 12 in 8eb1820

	if(isBot()){
	die('Bot Not Allowed');
	}

but the 1 day time long, maybe means a video in loop

[walt93]

Daniel, these aren't normal web scraper bots.

These bots purposefully inflate view counts. They watch at 2x speed, and they hit the play button again. And again. And again.

Any human watching a video 12 times in 24 hours at 2x speed, we should not record either. Once is enough.

I'm surprised and impressed that we have bots in the ecosystem that do this TBH.

[DanielnetoDotCom]

I am not sure how to deal with them.

one option is if they do have a specific user-agent that we can block

[walt93]

How would I get their user agent? I think the swarm has quieted down/stopped now…

One way to fix is just based on their behavior (watching over-and-over at 2X speed):

• after user watches full duration of video,
• stop logging view minutes for 24 hours (also - stop serving VAST ads - I'm testing monetizing with them)

[JoshWho]

Only solution would be to not log guest views. Bots can be made to look like humans using chrome easily nowadays. You will be fighting a uphill battle trying to figure them all out.

Another solution would be to somehow include a captcha code before the player loads.

For more security and better bot defense, Install crowdsec and the IPtables bouncer, then get all the configs for it installed, for it and it will cut down on a huge portion of known bots and new bots it detects. https://crowdsec.net/?mtm_campaign=JoshWho

[DanielnetoDotCom]

you can get the user agents on the apache access logs