things I saw on Who's Online

[Guest puppet]

This is my first post, I hope this makes sense. I use v2.2 RC2 version, started early this year. I have no skill / understanding of computer matter beyond the normal daily use. I may be asking the obvious but please be patient with me. I am seriously worried about what I should do.

 

Question 1: A few days ago when I was looking at Who's Online page of my admin, saw something I had never seen. After "catalog/" where usually shows product page or path, some strange line including an outside URL (which turned out to be an attack site) was there. What does this mean? Since then I started to check the page more often, and saw another strange one, where someone gone straight into review page of a product - even though the button to review page is not shown in product page anymore. Also see cases of arriving into shopping cart with a product already in it, then disappear after a while without moving from there. What do they mean??

 

Question 2: I had been trying to use contributions, but most of the time, I can't even follow the instructions. So my website is pretty much just as the original version. Reading about security issues, it sounds like you are expected to add extra measures and expected to know about these things, beyond the original document. I began to feel that I am not entitled to use osC after all. Not only unable to understand technical issues, also English is not my first language, it adds a lot of strain to me. But I do not wish to put any risk to my customers. So if I can't understand and act on it, should I shut down the store? Is there any little thing even I can do? Does my website sounds unsafe following the Q1?

 

Please help me. I am very tempted to just delete the whole thing and go back to eBay (a defeat) even though I spent time to list some 600 products... Mostly I do not want to put any of my customers at risk. Thank you very much for your help in advance. (Sorry for long post.)

[Xpajun]

Without a list of the visitors you see on who's on line page I can't really reassure you but I suspect a lot of these may be search robots which don't obey the normal route to get to a page, but rather come and look at one page go and then come back again to look at another page linked to the first page and so on.

 

osCommerce is very daunting at first and the instructions for some of the add-ons can look rather vague - probably because there is no laid down way of presenting the instructions.

 

Adding extra security measures is entirely a personal thing - with a mirror site (either on line or your computer) you can play with the add-ons without risking breaking your store - updating your store once you have got your mirror store perfected without errors or you could find someone who has the time and is willing to do it for you.

 

After having the freedom of your own store I don't think you would like the dominating tactics of eBay now ;)