XF 2.3 Too Many Guests Online – Possible Bot Traffic?

[interforo]

Hi everyone,


I’m running a XenForo forum (Interfans.org) and I’ve noticed a rather unusual situation:

• Around 1,600 guests online simultaneously
• Only around 20 registered users online

I’m using Cloudflare, with some bots already blocked through custom firewall rules.


I’m wondering whether these guests are genuine visitors or whether a significant portion could be bots, AI crawlers or scrapers.


A few questions:

1. Can unidentified bots appear as regular guests in XenForo?
2. What’s the best way to identify and distinguish bot traffic from real visitors?
3. Are there any recommended add-ons or Cloudflare configurations for this?
4. Can this also affect Google Analytics 4 statistics?

I’d like to understand how much of my traffic is actually human before blocking additional crawlers and potentially affecting SEO.


Any advice or experiences would be appreciated!


Thanks!

 

[cdub]

See this thread:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/crazy-amount-of-guests.233649/unread

 

[Sim]

1. yes
2. https://xenforo.com/community/resources/known-bots.6489/ - although this is only useful if the bots identify themselves, and most of what you're seeing will be badly behaved ai or scraper bots who don't identify themselves. Everyone is experiencing this issue - it's not just you.
3. https://xenforo.com/community/resources/digitalpoint-app-for-cloudflare-r.8750/
4. yes, although Google are pretty good at filtering bots out of their data, a lot of ai/scraper bots will pretend to be real users and so it's not easy to differentiate

My advice: get your favourite AI system to help you configure Cloudflare to filter out problematic networks.

I've actually given Claude Code write access to my firewall rules in Cloudflare - it will monitor traffic to the site and recommend updating rules if a bot swarm is causing problems on the site. You can do the rules by hand based on your AI system's guidance if you don't want to give it write access - I actually recommend doing it this way to start with and only give it write access once you're confident in how it works.