Bot Mitigation and Service Disruption

[Edward]

Hello,

Just to make people aware of some goings on.

I've noticed a pattern of bots crawling the website unpolitely, these bots make too may requests and overload the server - resulting in errors for visitors.

I've planned to take a few reasonable steps to address this:
- Cloudflare Protection (In Progress) - This may disrupt service for a short time, you may see odd redirections or SSL errors.
- Rate Limiting (Prevent bots making too many requests in a short amount of time)
- Updating robots.txt file, which may prevent some unwanted bots crawling the page if they respect the contents of the file.

- Edward

[LPGC]

[Gilbertd]

All working perfectly again now, thanks

[robertXX]

Thank you Edward

[Edward]

Just a quick update on this:

Since putting Cloudflare in front of the site and enabling some Bot protection rules we've seen a dramatic drop in the number of unwanted bots scraping the site, attempting to spam signup etc.

From time to mine you may be asked to 'Verify you're human' when visiting the forum. This challenge is part of the Cloudflare protection and is expected occasionally, probably more often if you make use of VPN or proxy services.

No other changes are planned, just keeping things up to date and maintenence.

If anybody encounters any issues just let me know.

[LPGC]

Thanks