Crazy amount of guests

[Kirby]

Give PHP more capacity and ensure the DB is well tuned. Problem solved.

I am a bit curious:
How would this solve the problem that AI crawlers feed their models with knowledge from our forums and thus drive away potential visitors to their services without generating revenue (like human visitors would)?

 

[Levina]

Did you try to do anything about it since you started the thread back in October last year?

As you may remember I'm on Cloud hosting so my choices are limited and I still don't want to switch to Cloudflare.

What I did in the past was use discourage mode. But if I put too many IP addresses in there it would throttle the site and eventually grind to a halt.

The error I made with that was to have cranked every setting up to 100%. So then I made some changes. I turned off everything except the redirect, which I set to 100%. Some still get through just by sheer volume, but it's minor and the site doesn't affect the site now. So this works for me.

But not when I have 12k bots all with different IP addresses. If I were smart I would get us on Cloudflare where I could probably block an entire ASN? But these bot swarms don't seem to stay long and they don't throttle the site.

 

[smallwheels]

As you may remember I'm on Cloud hosting so my choices are limited and I still don't want to switch to Cloudflare.

Understandable.

What I did in the past was use discourage mode. But if I put too many IP addresses in there it would throttle the site and eventually grind to a halt.

Foreseeable issue. And on top of that the wrong strategy that does harm to yourself but barely affects the scrapers.

But not when I have 12k bots all with different IP addresses. If I were smart I would get us on Cloudflare where I could probably block an entire ASN? But these bot swarms don't seem to stay long and they don't throttle the site.

You should read the thread that you started to better understand what is happening. Plus to find out that there are solutions that do not involve Cloudflare. I'd recommend using this add on

[XTR] IP Threat Monitor

Nov 21, 2025

Smart IP monitoring system protecting your forum from bots and DDoS attacks, boosting performance

• Osman
• bot blocking cache captcha ddos protection firewall ip monitoring performance rate limiting security seo
• Add-ons [2.x]

which should work on cloud and gives you

• rate limiting with challenge
• VPN blocking
• ASN blocking
• Country blocking
• Net and IP blacklisting
• Net and IP whitelisting
• realtime check of IPs against the proxycheck.io API

This is a toolset that can massively limit the problem. I can provide you with the commented list of 450+ ASNs I block and the countries that I block. Of both you can easily filter which you do not want to block due to your regular audience but way more than half of the ASNs are datacenter and not normal users, so no harm to expect. This will linder the issue massively.

On top of that this add on

Access log

Jun 17, 2022

Shows a list of bots, guests and members accessing your forum.

• AndyB
• Add-ons [2.x]

is relatively simple but does the job to provide you with the country an IP visiting your forum is coming from. Pretty neat for finding holes in your blocking strategy and fixing them.