All,
The flood of bots inundating the message board is starting to affect performance. CPU load continues to increase, all directly due to the number of BOTs that crawl the site. I attribute this to the latest AI bots that are sucking up content everywhere. And part of the problem is they are not identifying as BOTs. A little bit ago I logged in to find just shy of 1000 guests logged in 5 minutes. Those guests are obviously Bots, especially when you look and see multiple IPs looking at the same thread from 10 years ago at the same time.

The first indication something was going on was a week ago when the board froze due to maxing out the Who's Online memory table in the database. I got around that by switching that database entry from memory to disk. But the guests still came. I then reduced the Who's Online window from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. And they still come at a higher and higher rate.

We can't sustain this.

So unfortunately, I'm having to take the drastic step to remove the permission of guests (non-logged in people) to read threads. They can still view the forums and see the thread topics. But they will not be able to read content. Immediately after implementing this, the number of guests has dropped significantly. Unfortunately this will affect search results. I'm hoping it will cause more people to register and log-in on the board. We will see.

Right now I'm not sure if this will be a permanent change or not.

Your thoughts welcome.

PaulC

It's a shame to have to force registration to view threads. I am annoyed when I want to view something on a website just 1 time and it requires an account.

If the "users" are not identifying as BOTs, I don't know what the best solution is. Have you asked the site host support for suggestions?

Yeah, the site host didn't have any helpful hints unfortunately. On the up side, we're getting tons of new members.

By the way, for those looking... Hotmail does not appear to like the message board emails. Please use an email address other than hotmail to register. There ae some other ISPs in the same boat. If you don't immediately get a response from the message board after registering, check your spam / junk folder. If still nothing there, please try a different email address to register such as Gmail.

Paul
Thank you for all you do to keep this site up and running all these years

This same issue has been on other forums I'm on. One thought is all the "guests" are AI in there looking at stuff as a search function from Google or something of that nature.

Either way it's sucking up the bandwidth.

That's good news, that it isn't just an attack on this forum.