XF 2.2 Huge amount of guests

[oneobgynmd]

Hello
We have an audio forum. We normally see 3K online as guests, and 700 logged in.

The last few weeks we started seeing 4.5K as guest, then 6K, and today we are at 14.5K guests.

If I click the 'members online' and then the Robots page, we have 18 page, not a problem. If I click 'Guests' I see 645 pages!

Has anyone seen a snap or DDS attack coming up as Guest online. The threads these Guests are viewing is genuine threads, and different threads, so not an obvious script / attack.

Any help would be great.

 

[Paul B]

Bot swarms have been plaguing sites for the past few weeks or more.

 

[benFF]

Yes this happened to me all day yesterday

 

[Dragonfruit]

Likely AI bots.

 

[AjayJunkies]

Same with us on Admin-Junkies.com

We normally see 600 guests, we are up to 1400 (x2.5 increase). Someone's AI bot is vacuuming up our forum conversations

This just started about a day ago.

 

[CedricV]

Sounds like bad server optimization.

 

[infinitysnapz]

when it comes to bots the approach i have begun to take is to block entire datacentre ASNs - although i'd also advise exercising caution that you don't accidentally hit residential or mixed providers