XF 2.2 How are 500 'guests' (AI & crawlers) browsing my forum when those permissions are turned off?

[tribedude]

I had a situation a few months ago where AI scrapers, predominantly Chinese, were scraping our forum so I removed guests or unregistered permissions to view or browse the forum. I essentially put it behind the log in screen. This worked for a while, but now they are back.
I see 500 'guests' browsing our forum, so they must have found a way to do this again.

What can I do to keep them out? How can they browse without permissions?

 

[captainmatt29]

They can still reach your page even with no permissions so the chances are that the stats you are seeing arent that they are freely viewing it but are on the homepage

 

[briansol]

Viewing an error page "no permissions" counts as a view

 

[tribedude]

I had a realization that they may be bounces I implemented the cloudflare bot screen the other day and was pleasantly surprised that the even the free service comes with a dashboard full of traffic analytics tools that are better than google's and easier to use.

Thanks for your help everyone.