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Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 28, 19:24
by decipha
I know many of you have seen the forum getting bombarded by AI bots severely slowing down the forum lately. Due to this I had to limit the total number of connections and prevent guest searching. Hopefully it doesnt inconvenience anyone too much.
For anyone in to IT its some gruesome processing power to hit a single forum with over a thousand different IPs at once with each doing several queries per second. Im really surprised how well its gone considering.
Im sure they'll move on again after they get blocked enough but just thought Id let everyone know.
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 28, 19:46
by ATPCR
A day or two ago, I got an interesting page that said that 1203 users were here and it wouldn't let the page that I was wanting to look at load. Is this a related issue?
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 29, 06:16
by red5.0fogger
What are they even trying to do? ( Bots)
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 29, 10:23
by Cougar281
red5.0fogger wrote: ↑2025 Oct 29, 06:16
What are they even trying to do? ( Bots)
Bot things. Could be scraping info, Artificial Idiot bots trying to post gibberish and spam/scam links, etc.
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 29, 11:44
by wwhite
This site is an easy target.
Now with AI bots, sites will get hammered harder.
- no SSL, or it is not properly setup
- phpBB 3.3.10 released February 2023( that's 2.5 years ago)
- GoDaddy is a horrible host, easily targeted by bots
Man in the middle attacks, stealing usernames/passwords, account info, etc.
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]
User i3559710_bb1 already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]
Super common with Godaddy shared hosting.
This is where tools like Cloudflare come in handy.
I bet the IPs are coming from China, found out what country the majority of IPs are coming from and block/blacklist the whole country.
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 29, 11:45
by wwhite
OH!!!, is that your database user for the forum? i3559710_bb1
That's 50% way into hacking it!!
Re: Hundreds of Bots and Spam
Posted: 2025 Oct 29, 17:08
by decipha
yeah
they are trying to learn how to tune to better advise AI responses
No SSL needed for what we do here and not worth the cost also some of the corporations I work at cant connect to SSL
yeah a bunch from china, problem is last time I blacklisted IP ranges I had some users get blocked, even some not in china using alternate IPs
Google is a big contender too trying to learn up their AI. Google is far worse than anything china has.