XF 2.2 Question about the un-registered / guest numbers in that widget...

tribedude

tribedude

Active member
I am getting extremely high concurrent guest load in the sidebar stats widget. Normally we are in the 200 range, but it has been over 600 for days and today at over 1100 guests. I had to reduce all the unregistered group permissions to nothing because they were slowing down the board, so now we are essentially off the grid.

We still have 1000 guests now, but it is not seeming to impact board speed because they can't do anything,,,

I have a couple of questions,,

1) where does Xenforo get the guest data numbers from? How are these numbers to high if guests can't see the board itself now. Are the numbers being pulled from guests hitting the login page via cookies or soewmthing? Where is that data coming from?

2) Could this be AI scraping bots and if so, how can they be blocked since they ignore robots.tx these days?

bot load.webp

Thanks for your advice,
 
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Also, if you don't have @Sim's Known Bots add-on, it's worth adding. That identifies a huge number of bots beyond the few that XF identifies out of box so gives you a better picture of who is actually in that huge number of guests.

Known Bots Sim

Known Bots

Adds additional definitions for bot detection in sessions
 
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Keep your eyes peeled for guest traffic spikes fellow board admins!

There must have been an advancement in AI last week that enabled the creation of synthetic messageboard users, because the load happened all at once. A large number of these bots appear to be Chinese. As AI generated sludge proliferates across the internet and reduces its information quality, human generated content becomes more important and more valuable as information sources for these AI companies.
 
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tribedude said:
Keep your eyes peeled for guest traffic spikes fellow board admins!

There must have been an advancement in AI last week that enabled the creation of synthetic messageboard users, because the load happened all at once. A large number of these bots appear to be Chinese. As AI generated sludge proliferates across the internet and reduces its information quality, human generated content becomes more important and more valuable as information sources for these AI companies.
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You can use Cloudflare WAF rules to block countries outside your domain. There’s a lot of this happening everywhere. Take a look at your guest ip’s and start blocking from there
 
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