Someone is creating thousands of empty baskets on our site

[TheTeaTable]

I did submit a ticket, but response time seems to be rather slow.

Today someone started creating thousands of empty baskets on our site. I eventually put it into maintenance mode, because I don't know what else to do. I waited a couple hours and brought it back, and the empty baskets instantly started again.

Actually, some of the baskets aren't empty. It seems it's a script that adds one item, then deletes it, leaving an empty basket.

I'm no expert at this and I really have no idea how to stop it.

What would the purpose be, other than to be a total pain? They're not carding. They just create a basket, empty it, and do it again, over and over.

FWIW, a few days ago we did have someone carding, which I was able to stop. I almost wonder if this is them punishing me for stopping the carding.

[thilsabeck]

To me, it sounds like "they" is a search engine/SEO/web service crawler accessing the site, which is typically benign behavior and quite common- not a reason to turn off access to the site.

There is a setting in Miva to "defer creation of empty baskets" which can stop basket creation unless an item is actively added. This setting is located under Settings -> Store Settings.

We will take a look at your submitted ticket as to take a closer look at the traffic and your basket settings and follow up more personally that way.

Kind Regards,

[TheTeaTable]

Tim, I enabled that and brought the store back online. It still happened, so I took it back offline. I don't think it's anything benign like that. Not all the baskets are empty, and some of their contents constantly change, but most are empty. This time I left the empty baskets, rather than deleting them. 65 in about 30 seconds.

[TheTeaTable]

To me, it sounds like "they" is a search engine/SEO/web service crawler accessing the site, which is typically benign behavior and quite common- not a reason to turn off access to the site.

There is a setting in Miva to "defer creation of empty baskets" which can stop basket creation unless an item is actively added. This setting is located under Settings -> Store Settings.

We will take a look at your submitted ticket as to take a closer look at the traffic and your basket settings and follow up more personally that way.

Kind Regards,

Well Tim, as I said, I enabled "defer creation of empty baskets", and before I headed home I put the store back online. It only takes me 10 minutes to get home, but in that time about 1,600 baskets were generated. So, I took it back offline.

Not all of the baskets are empty. some have a qty of one, all of the same item. A different item than was being used earlier.