XF 1.5 Site was being flooded by bots - Tag related?

[overifist]

About 15 minutes ago my site appeared to be flooded by bots.

A thread was created last night that gained close to 2k views in an hour. That doesn't usually happen. Another thread that was posted a couple days ago had 14k views. Both threads were tagged with "android".

About 15 min ago an error appeared that said "too many connection". I didn't get a screenshot. But I did get a screenshot of the next 2 errors.

These 2 errors are about 1 min apart.



After I removed the threads from public view everything seemed to calm down.

Could this be related to tags? Can bots target tags?

 

[Mike]

I doubt this would be tag specific, but bots can target pretty much anything. It's tricky to say what specifically. It's possibly they just picked them up via a search engine and that using "Android" in the title might have triggered it. Equally, the errors could be related to other things on the server.

 

[overifist]

I doubt this would be tag specific, but bots can target pretty much anything. It's tricky to say what specifically. It's possibly they just picked them up via a search engine and that using "Android" in the title might have triggered it. Equally, the errors could be related to other things on the server.

So is there nothing I can do to keep it from happening again?

 

[Mike]

Well if you're running into issues like this, it would imply you're either being (D)DoS'ed or your server is overloaded. DDoS is generally outside the scope of an application and should be blocked a level above it; server load may be caused by other applications on the server or simply require beefier specs or improved configuration to handle greater load.

 

[AndyB]

About 15 minutes ago my site appeared to be flooded by bots.

You can use this add-on to white list bots:

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/robots.3900/

 

[andybond]

I had this issue.

I put an addon that allowed 3 views for unregistered guests before it required registration. It calmed things right down.

Other ways are to prevent guests from viewing content , that seemed to work as well.