But...I don't have a forum! Or a board!

[mjasonprickett]

This isn't really a big thing, just something odd I noticed.

I was bored this evening and poking around in the "recent visitors" section when I saw something a bit peculiar. Along with the regular hits to my site, the search bots, and FeedBurner pinging my rss feed, I noticed that there were quite a few hits on parts of my site that never existed. Namely, subfolders named /phpbb, /forum, /forums, and /board.

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, had any forum software installed on the main part of my site. The times I did, back when I was testing all the Fantastico stuff, I tended put things like that in a special subdomain out of the normal flow of my site.

The really odd thing is that all the hits seem to come from different IP addresses running different operating systems and different browsers. And each individual visit tends to try several different folders in succession. I guess I have to assume that it is either one person staging an organized, distributed, small-scale attack on my non-existent forums, or several people who are utterly mistaken as to whether I have board software running on my site or not.

Anyone else run into anything like this? Not terribly worried about it, just thought it was curious.

[siguie]

I'm sure there can be other reasons but mostly they are script kiddies and spammers running automated programs to search out the most likely places a forum may be located. It's important to always keep scripts up to date but sometimes people don't and their forums can be compromized which is what the searchers where probably hoping for.

It's just part of owning a site and nothing to be overly concerned about ... I used to get a bazillion requests for "formail" too

[hofmax]

I agree, bots or script kiddies or both looking for targets.