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http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl General Discussion >> Feedback >> bots, DDOS? http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1760337439 Message started by freediver on Oct 13^th, 2025 at 4:37pm

Title: bots, DDOS?
Post by freediver on Oct 13^th, 2025 at 4:37pm

Lately there's been about 2500 'guests' active in the last 15 minutes, listed as separate IP addresses on the forum home page. The IP addresses are all different and unrelated. I am pretty sure that is why the forum has been slow. Any idea where that is coming from or how to block it?

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Setanta on Oct 13^th, 2025 at 5:16pm

Something like cloudfare is the only way to really put the breaks on things like ddos, if that's what it is. That people can still somewhat use the site shows it's not a very determined ddos, if it is.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by freediver on Oct 13^th, 2025 at 9:31pm

Looks like it's bots, in particular these 3:

Amazonbot
PetalBot
meta-externalagent/1.1

Anyone have any insight into them? I am tempted to just block all 3, or maybe try throttling them, but I don't want to harm any search engine rankings. As far as I can tell they are just harvesting data to train AI.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Redmond Neck on Oct 14^th, 2025 at 2:18pm

freediver wrote on Oct 13^th, 2025 at 9:31pm:

I would block them temporarily and see what happens!

Its bloody terrible at the moment trying to waoit for the relly slow loading of postst!

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by freediver on Oct 14^th, 2025 at 3:16pm

I have blocked all 3, but not seen any improvement yet. I'll give it 24 hours, as I understand the bots might not check the robots.txt file regularly. If that doesn't fix it, it means something is pretending to be Amazonbot etc, which will be harder to deal with.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Setanta on Oct 14^th, 2025 at 6:31pm

If they are AI bots you could have a read.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Setanta on Oct 14^th, 2025 at 6:49pm

I'd try blocking every crawler in robots.txt then noting which ones do not honour the robots file and ban the lot, then allow the rest again.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by freediver on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 11:17am

Hi everyone, quick update. It looks like the site is being slowed down by bot traffic. These are "bad" bots that don't obey the rules and are fairly good at impersonating real traffic, so there is no cheap and easy way stop them. From what I can gather they are most likely gathering data for training AI.

I got a bit of a reprieve yesterday by rebooting the server, however the bots seem to have figured that one out as it does not work any more.

I still have a few more things I can try out, but won't get on to them in a hurry.

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Frank on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 2:26pm

freediver wrote on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 11:17am:

Guests: 3451

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by Sir lastnail on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 7:45pm

freediver wrote on Oct 16^th, 2025 at 11:17am:

use this ;)

https://cleantalk.org/

Title: Re: bots, DDOS?
Post by freediver on Oct 17^th, 2025 at 10:51am

Bot traffic seems to have halved, according to the forum stats, and speed is back near normal. It was nothing I did, and I don't think the hosting company did anything either. Maybe the bots have just learned how to not clog up the forum.