Confused Bird Forum

Full Version: Testing a bad bot firewall
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This forum has experienced a massive increase in traffic over the past few months, hitting over 50% my hosting traffic allowance in April.  From looking at the statistics it turned out that the Bytespider bot alone was responsible for over 90% of the traffic and rogue bots making registration attempts and looking for WordPress, Joomla, etc. vulnerabilities making up most of the rest.

To try tackling Bytespider's excessive resource usage, I have installed the Block Bad Bots / 8G Firewall:
https://phpbb.hifikabin.me.uk/viewtopic.php?t=110
https://perishablepress.com/8g-firewall/

If anyone has any issue with the forum, such as viewing posts on a certain device or web browser, you can mention here.
From looking back at my May traffic which includes traffic on my original "Editor Seán" blog, this turned to be quite effective for being a purely htaccess rules based firewall:

[attachment=1258]

So far I have not experienced any issues and at least means avoiding having to pay for excess traffic and keep the forum ad-free.