Testing a bad bot firewall

[Seán]

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.

[Seán]

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:

   

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.