Bots on the server

[Jim]

Bots that look to be in China are hitting the server hard seemingly often the forum. It much more than I recall seeing before and enough to affect performance of the server.  I am considering taking down the forum temporarily and possibly suspending TM overall while I figure out how to limit them...

[vdeane]

Could what's used on the AARoads Wiki be used here?

[Jim]

I've asked for advice from the Siena network admins, and now the load is back to normal or less.  Hopefully it's something they've done.  I'll leave the forum active for now.

[Jim]

Bots hitting the forum remain very low.  I still plan to block web requests from all of (at least) China on the server itself or have that done at the network level before the requests even get there.

[rschen7754]

We had to both use Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) and block Alibaba IP addresses at the firewall level in order to get things to a manageable state.