Crazy amount of guests

[Levina]

You need to install and use cloudflare since you don't have the option to use my fail2ban solution, which runs at the server level ( won't work on managed hosting )
Discourage mode is probably computationally not up to the task of handling the 100's of requests per second these bots can dish out.

Every website has this problem with AI scrapers and hosting a website of any appreciable size on the internet is like this today.

Thanks. Appreciate the reply. Well, then I guess I need to switch to Cloudflare.

 

[beerForo]

XF uses cloudflare and the current stats are: Total: 6,724 (members: 20, guests: 6,704)

 

[Suzanne O]

At the moment I am being bombarded by IP addresses all starting with 43.173. and all "Viewing unknown page" where they have no access.

I tried putting the address 43.173.* in discourage mode where they are redirected but that slowed my site down almost to a halt. I then removed it from discourage mode, after which everything worked normally again.

Around 1000 guests at the moment but the 43.173.* IP's are the only one I'm seeing in the guests list at the moment so they seem to be pushing everything else out. Not sure what to do. And why would the site almost shut down when I redirect them in the discourage mode?

View attachment 328968

Same here. I IP Range banned them. But i think i might go into my CPanel and block them in there.

 

[Levina]

Same here. I IP Range banned them. But i think i might go into my CPanel and block them in there.

I don't quite know what banning IP addresses or an entire range does exactly. I think they can still visit?

 

[beerForo]

It's bad advice.

 

[Levina]

XF uses cloudflare and the current stats are: Total: 6,724 (members: 20, guests: 6,704)

Are you saying that Cloudflare doesn't make much difference?

 

[beerForo]

No, I am saying this is the new normal.

 

[Wing]

@Suzanne O typically doesn’t give good advice

 

[ES Dev Team]

Cloudflare makes enough of a difference that it should prevent your site from crashing i think. But yes, Xenforo's site shows us that it's not as effective as we'd like.

You can also insert ban lists in cloudflare but that shouldn't be your primary defense, AI scrapers change their IPs frequently enough. Your best defense system catches the new IPs based on behavior. IP banning boosts the defense, but it's going to take some manual cultivating.

I prefer the fail2ban route - which is probably not available to you since you're on a managed service, due to it's better results. But you need someone with unix knowledge to tune it, so just use cloudflare for now, it's your best shot.

 

[RippC]

Got hit with this last week also. Noticed HUGE spikes in random traffic coming from Brazil where usually I get almost none. What I did was in Cloudlfare, head into the security settings and set up a rule to present an "Interactive Challenge" to any traffic coming from Brazil. Stopped it dead in its tracks. Actual users get hit with (I'm guessing I'm not sure what it looks like) the "I'm not a robot" thing or similar, while the bots just get stonewalled. For now anyway.