Recent content by BrettC

I can see the scenario unfolding now: companies balking about 'oh noes, that means we lose X amount of cash with this downtime!!'.... Many companies/entities this week probably had a crash course on immutable rolling updates and upgrading their code. ;)

Anubis would (well, it should anyways) see it as a new session, as it's lacking a cookie with a validation string, thus throwing it a new challenge issuance. The backend / Anubis-side would/should also see a mismatch.

Agreed. It's likely time for a collaborative page of resources, tips, and tools on how to 'deal with and mitigate' AI Scrapers/botnets. This thread has been very noisy since most of us have found methods that can adequately manage abusive scraper bots, that being on-forum addons, same-server...

If y'all haven't seen it yet, check out this thread by @LogicWhisper : https://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-are-you-blocking-ai-scrapers-that-use-regular-member-accounts.240829/ This is a very interesting but yet a bit alarming development. Barring the potential legalities and privacy...

Indeed. These sort of attacks indeed have been around since the internet began, but the rapidity and distributedness(sp?) of these style of attacks is growing concerning. I normally see it as a "spray n' pray" or a blind method of attack - not this persistent and repeated level of attack. The...

Oh, very nice! I had originally implemented a basic file drop-in that Chris D provided here: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/remove-validation-tag-line-deleted.200862/post-1549916 hence the suggestion thread for it to be controllable in the ACP. Looks like your addon hits the nail on the...

Tag lines aren't "a thing" on the core feature of XenForo: discussion threads. As such, I would like to put forth a suggestion to... 1. Add a global XFRM option on/off toggle to enable/disable the requirement of a tag line. Ticked = as is currently, required. Unticked = no longer required, not...

As @Anthony Parsons stated above: It's either a bot, or it's not. When we refer to bots, we're effectively depicting the entire ecosystem of bots. That would include both good and bad bots. That includes, but isn't limited to entities such as indexer bots, AI Scrapers, probing bots/drones...

While not related to the AI Scraper hellscape... has anyone noticed in recent months that bad actors are using Google Cloud's infrastructure, and has been on an absolute rampage performing fairly notable DNS probing/rainbow-attacks? That is then coupled with persistent, continuous, and...

I'm so hesitant on robot-only surgery, let alone human-controlled/directed robot surgery... that is a massive rabbit hole in its own regard. I can see the use-case for it, but damn... I'm so conflicted with that. Robot has a motor failure? You could be injured. Robot loses power for some reason...

You made my heart skip a beat for a moment there. Seen the 172.135 IP segment and thought "oh no, was one of my VPS's involved in doing something naughty!?" then i seen the other half and thought "PANIK AVERTED". :D I'd be curious to know more about the Apple VPN / Relay service though. That...

I commented something similar elsewhere on the forums in early-mid-2026: If AI was/was-not used to assist-with or solely-used to develop an addon/resource, a tick-box or item selection box needs to be available to depict AI usage - and making it a required item. Sorry @Painbaker - used your...

That little finding gives a pretty good idea that these proxies / resi proxies are more or less hijacked devices, or devices where the user/operator of said device is unaware (if they're aware of it - urgh), that their phone is partaking in a proxy network (and possibly a botnet). :-/

I believe this should satisfy the condition as a skip rule: http.request.cookies["xf_user"] contains "xf_user"

Google Analytics is based on raw page access and invoking the GA script, similar to the forum active users list invoking any XF2 routes. However, GA will tend to intentionally undercount clients when the client intentionally ignores/filters/blocks the GA URL or has JS fully disabled. If you...