Quantely Activity vs ShieldUp – Bad Bots, Scrapers, Attackers

Lightweight, privacy-conscious pageview and event logging plugin that runs inside your own website. Quantely Activity is built to capture activity reliably under imperfect conditions through server-side recording and optional client-side signals, while supporting filtering for bots, unwanted pages, IP sources and selectable WordPress logged-in roles. Quantely Activity can be used for: Monitoring site behavior Reviewing traffic patterns Security and bot analysis Feeding downstream analytics layers Quantely Activity is turn-key: install it, and pageviews and events should begin appearing shortly after. Raw activity data is retained for a configurable short period, helping keep the plugin lightweight and privacy-conscious. What Quantely Activity is Quantely Activity is a capture and monitoring layer. It is designed to record activity on your site in a structured and reliable way, with a strong focus on signal capture and data integrity. Unlike many analytics tools, it does not focus on marketing analytics, attribution modelling, or behavioral profiling. It also does not rely solely on browser JavaScript. A server-side baseline helps ensure pageviews are still captured when scripts or beacons fail. Hybrid capture engine The plugin combines server-side pageview capture with optional browser-side signals. Typical flow: Browser request ↓ Server pageview baseline ↓ Browser attach (Beacon) – engagement pings – interaction events ↓ Correlation via pageview identifiers ↓ Bot classification and exclusions ↓ Deduplication and storage This architecture helps keep capture reliable under real-world conditions where browser-only tracking can miss signals. Event correlation and deduplication Quantely Activity links browser-side signals back to the pageview where they occurred. Engagement pings, clicks, form submissions, and similar events can be correlated to their originating pageview. Built-in deduplication helps avoid duplicate records when similar signals are captured from both browser and server-side sources. This keeps the activity stream more accurate and easier to interpret. Fully on-site All captured activity is stored in your own WordPress database. Quantely Activity does not send captured activity data to external services. IP addresses are never stored in plain form, and the plugin does not perform cross-site tracking. Privacy-aware design The plugin is designed with privacy-conscious principles in mind: No plain IP addresses stored Short configurable retention window Optional honoring of GPC / DNT signals No external tracking services Data remains on your own site This gives site owners visibility into activity while keeping capture local and controlled. Hooks Quantely Activity exposes a small developer API for integrations and downstream processing. qmon_hit_before_insert — Filter a normalized hit array before it is stored. qmon_hit_recorded — Action fired after a hit has been stored. This is the main integration point for forwarding or persisting captured records. qmon_event_normalize — Filter a normalized event payload before it is finalized. qmon_event_db_dedupe_window_sec — Filter the database deduplication window for events. qmon_bot_verdict — Filter the bot-classification verdict before it is finalized.

Tired of bad bots, scrapers, attackers and sluggish website performance? By providing real-time monitoring of accessing IPs, HTTP codes, URLs, and user agents, organized analytics, customizable timeline and visualizations, ShieldUp will help you indentify and combat threats like bad bots, scrapers, malicous attackers. Which will improve website security and performance by reducing the load on your server resources for a snappy website and great user experience. Key Features 🛡️ Advanced Security: ShieldUp protects your site from malicious bots, scrapers, attackers and hackers, shielding your website from potential threats. 🚀 Optimized Performance: Improve website speed and user experience by eliminating unnecessary requests from scrapers, bad bots and brute force attackers 🗃️ Comprehensive Data Collection: ShieldUp logs and archive accessing IPs, HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, timestamps, etc. 📊 Detailed Data Insights: ShieldUp will analyze, organize and displays IP data based on IP ranges, request counts, details, offering a comprehensive view of your traffic within user-friendly tables. 📅 Custom Time Period: Select specific time ranges through an intuitive calendar feature for in-depth data analysis. 📈 Visualize Data: Easily visualize traffic trends and patterns with our user-friendly graphs. 🛠️ IP Tools: Helps you with actions like retrieving detailed IP information from DB or third-party tools. 🌐 Cloudflare Integration (Pro): Seamlessly connect your website to Cloudflare, enhancing security and performance even further by leverage Cloudflare’s powerful features. ⚙️ Advanced IP Management (Pro): Take control with a click. Manage IPs and IP ranges effortlessly, with actions like blocking, JavaScript challenges, whitelisting, or remove rules using Cloudflare’s firewall through the plugin. 💼 Centralized IP Database (Pro): Keep all IPs controlled by your WP plugin and Cloudflare in a centralized database for efficient management and tracking. 📝 User Activity Logging (Pro): Maintain detailed logs of all IP controls by users, ensuring accountability and providing a historical record of security actions. 🏆 Priority Support (Pro): Pro members get priority support, so you can expect quick help with any questions or issues. Please Note: Yes, the Pro version is undeniably impressive. However, the free version is really what you need and will get the job done. How it works 1. Installation and Activation Start by downloading and installing the ShieldUp plugin. Once activated, it seamlessly integrates with your WordPress, ready to work its magic. 2. Data Collection ShieldUp starts by collecting crucial data about the traffic to your website. It keeps a record of accessing IPs, including HTTP response codes, URLs, user agents, and timestamps. This data is organized into user-friendly tables and presented through interactive graphs, allowing you to gain valuable insights into your website’s traffic patterns. 3. Select, Organize and Display Data You can choose a specific time frame, making it easy to identify which IPs are accessing your site the most. It also groups IPs into /16 and /24 ranges and along with graphical representation helps you visualize trends, spot unusual activity and potential security threats. 4. Cloudflare Integration (Pro) ShieldUp seamlessly integrates with Cloudflare in PRO version, enhancing your website’s security even further. Using the Cloudflare API, you can manage IPs and IP ranges right from your WordPress dashboard. Implement blocks, JavaScript challenges, whitelist entries, or remove rules with just a few clicks. 5. IP Tools & IP Management Each IP listed in the user-friendly interface comes with action buttons, enabling you to ban IPs in your website’s firewall or CloudFlare, retrieve detailed IP information from third-party tools, and perform other custom actions. 6. Enhanced Security ShieldUp employs advanced security measures to protect your website from a wide range of threats. It identifies and blocks malicious bots, scrapers, attackers, and hackers, ensuring that your website remains secure. 7. Optimized Website Performance In addition to security, ShieldUp optimizes your website’s performance. It achieves this by filtering out unnecessary requests from bad bots, scrapers and other unwanted traffic. This optimization reduces the load on your server resources, resulting in a snappy and responsive website and great user experience. Firewalls, What we recommend? One of the best options would be a hardware-type firewall, but we wouldn’t be in this situation if we had one. The next best option for managing HTTP and HTTPS traffic is a cloud-based firewall, such as CloudFlare, especially when it is available for free and offers a wide range of excellent features. In addition to that, we also use CSF for other security solutions and to manage traffic and ports related to services like mail and SSH. So, why do we think CloudFlare is a better solution for HTTP and HTTPS trafic, than “Traditional” Server/Software-Based Firewall (CSF) especially Plugin-Like Firewalls (WordPress Plugins)? Traditional firewalls, while valuable, have limitations when compared to Cloudflare’s robust security and performance capabilities. These firewalls primarily protect your server or website by consuming server resources, leaving them vulnerable to large-scale attacks, among other things. In contrast, Cloudflare operates a global network that defends against threats at the network edge, providing superior DDoS protection and accelerated content delivery. By choosing Cloudflare, you gain a comprehensive, cloud-based solution that strengthens your website’s resilience and speed, effectively surpassing the capabilities of traditional local firewalls when it comes to HTTP and HTTPS trafic. Here are some of the main features of CloudFlare: Global Network Security: Cloudflare operates a vast global network that acts as a protective shield for your website, filtering out malicious traffic and threats before they even reach your server. This distributed approach ensures that attacks are mitigated at the network edge, preserving your server resources. Content Caching: Cloudflare’s caching infrastructure stores copies of your website’s content at data centers around the world. This means visitors experience faster load times as they access cached content from a server nearest to them, reducing server load and improving website responsiveness. Web Application Firewall (WAF): Cloudflare offers a comprehensive Web Application Firewall that can be finely tuned to your specific needs. It provides a robust defense against common web application attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), without the need for additional on-site firewall plugins. IP Control and Access Management: Cloudflare’s firewall allows you to control and manage IP access with precision. You can easily set rules to block or allow specific IPs, IP ranges, or countries, giving you granular control over who can access your website. DDoS Protection: Cloudflare’s network is designed to withstand large-scale DDoS attacks, providing a shield against volumetric threats that would overwhelm on-site firewalls. This ensures uninterrupted website availability. Performance Optimization: Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) optimizes the delivery of your website’s assets, including images, scripts, and stylesheets, resulting in reduced latency and faster load times for your visitors. Scalability and Reliability: Cloudflare’s infrastructure is highly scalable and redundant, ensuring that your website remains available even during traffic spikes or server failures. By integrating Cloudflare with your WordPress site, you not only enhance security but also optimize performance, reduce server load, and simplify IP access control, all while benefiting from Cloudflare’s global network and advanced security features. It’s a comprehensive solution that takes your website’s protection and performance to the next level. This is why we use it on all our websites, including the Pro version of this plugin as well. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use it for your website if you haven’t already, whether you intend to use this plugin or not. Please note that we still use and recommend that you use a ‘Traditional’ server/software-based firewall like CSF, in conjunction with CloudFlare, to cover various security aspects such as traffic/ports for mail, FTP, SSH, etc.