Bots are hitting Sponsorchat real hard

[TheButcher]

Hi guys you might have noticed some moments where things are slow, we've been on it since 4am Wednesday, the techs are doing their best, I've talked to sales and the tech depart multiple times on the phone. here is the 24 stats from the phpbb script, it's insane.

"In total there were 270639 bots in the past 24 hours", that is huge. It's a 4 cpu box with 32 gigs of ram, and I am surprised it is holding up so well. I am looking to upgrade to a more powerful server because the only thing bots do that spikes the cpu usage is they hit the registration and search pages here. The captcha stops all of them completing the registration. Even if they could get past captcha they can not post in real time until I manually check the first post and approve it.

I am surprised how many bots get to the site, it's insane.

I lost track how many times I have restarted the sql and apache on here in the last day and a half, not to mention restarted the sever itself.

We are on top of it, the number of IP's blocked is crazy. You get 1000's of bots using the same IP.

Peace

[tacnet]

Hey bud

Have you thought about putting something like google's recaptcha on your forms https://developers.google.com/recaptcha

At the moment, your search forms, report forms etc are open to bots and having a captcha code would stop most of them

[NSFWstory]

Try putting the site behind a CDN like Cloudflare and then add a rate limiting rule or bot challenge.

[TheButcher]

Thanks for the ideas tacnet and NSFWstory. Just took an hour nap was up all night messing around with support tickets and restarting the server. I'll look into it in a bit.

Peace

[voyeurz]

Bots are taking over the internet there was a recent article about this

[LuKenGas]

Both my servers are under bot attacks since early this morning and they are at 2 separate hosts

[tacnet]

These days you have to have a lot of extra headroom on your servers to handle the bots

A few years back, we switched to a load balanced server cluster of 3 servers. The load balancer sends the hit to whichever server is least busy and now, together with the CDN, I hardly notice the bot traffic

[gspotman]

It is across the internet something needs to be done about bots, my sites are not immune, they are under constant bot attacks for a few weeks.

[tacnet]

These days you have to have a lot of extra headroom on your servers to handle the bots

A few years back, we switched to a load balanced server cluster of 3 servers. The load balancer sends the hit to whichever server is least busy and now, together with the CDN, I hardly notice the bot traffic

Would you believe it, shortly after posting this I went and checked the stats and we are under heavy bot attack right now too. 12k hits so far today and every one from a unique IP address so almost impossible to block

It looks like this is a consequence of AI bots scanning the internet for data. 8000% year on year increase in bot traffic !!

The numbers in this video are shocking

[tacnet]

Hmm just had a further thought on this. If these recent bot attacks are the result of AI gathering data, then why would they be spoofing the IP address for each hit ???

That sounds more malicious to me. I wonder if this is some kind of state sponsored thing from somewhere like Iran, China or Russia ???

[TheButcher]

I participate on the official phpBB forum since I use the script here, and was there earlier today to see if there are any other forums being affected by bots and this thread which is 51 pages long started in May 2025 is a discussion of bot attacks on forums. The bot issue here really started being a concern around that time last year.

I have been restarting mysql and apache here about 10-15 times a day, they take less than 30 seconds between them, I am also restarting the server (graceful) about 5 times a day. I try not do a reboot of the server as it takes 2-4 minutes and during that time no one can read or post. This recent increase in bots here started last week. We have blocked so many IP's the joke I made the other day to my tech guy is there will be no attack here because we have blocked all IP's out there no one can reach the board any more.

[tacnet]

I participate on the official phpBB forum since I use the script here, and was there earlier today to see if there are any other forums being affected by bots and this thread which is 51 pages long started in May 2025 is a discussion of bot attacks on forums. The bot issue here really started being a concern around that time last year.

I have been restarting mysql and apache here about 10-15 times a day, they take less than 30 seconds between them, I am also restarting the server (graceful) about 5 times a day. I try not do a reboot of the server as it takes 2-4 minutes and during that time no one can read or post. This recent increase in bots here started last week. We have blocked so many IP's the joke I made the other day to my tech guy is there will be no attack here because we have blocked all IP's out there no one can reach the board any more.

Blocking IPs only works if the bot is not spoofing its IP each time. What I am seeing is around 20,000 unique IPs yesterday and and about the same the day before so IP blocking is just not feasible.

Luckily its all coming via one affiliate account so I have been able to divert all that traffic to our index page. Our index page is the only page on the network that isn't produced "on-the-fly", instead the html gets updated every 30 minutes so there is no impact on our SQL server no matter how many hits they throw at it

[TheButcher]

Blocking IPs only works if the bot is not spoofing its IP each time. What I am seeing is around 20,000 unique IPs yesterday and and about the same the day before so IP blocking is just not feasible.

Luckily its all coming via one affiliate account so I have been able to divert all that traffic to our index page. Our index page is the only page on the network that isn't produced "on-the-fly", instead the html gets updated every 30 minutes so there is no impact on our SQL server no matter how many hits they throw at it

Between Thursday midnight and Friday midnight there were 270K bots on here. With all the IP's blocked and rebooting the server multiple times The rolling 5 minute stats on the phpBB script shows as of now.

"In total there are 6398 users online :: 21 registered, 0 hidden and 6377 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)"

Because we have disabled so many bots by name they show up as "guests" so now I can not tell how many non-registered users are on the board but that is a small price to pay for keeping the thing running.

From CPanel the server status now is.


"sshd up [“sshd” is ok.]
Server Load 2.40 [“Server Load” is ok.]
CPU Count 4 [“CPU Count” is ok.]
Memory Used 6.85% [“Memory Used” is ok.]
Swap 0.01% [“Swap” is ok.]"



This server has usually run at 0.3 to 0.5 load but it's holding up relatively well with that many bots on here even at 2.4 load average.




But the server is at

[alsporn]

The problem seems to be mysql queries which slows down the site, is there a way to prevent anyone not registered going a search or any function that requires mysql?

[tacnet]

The problem seems to be mysql queries which slows down the site, is there a way to prevent anyone not registered going a search or any function that requires mysql?

It won't be searches so much. On a site like this (where new content is being added all the time) every page is dynamic and will run dozens of MySql queries with every page view. You could block all guests from being able to view anything but that's not really a good idea as users want to see what the site is about plus you would also block google, bing etc etc

But if you have a site where new content is added say once or twice a day, then its very easy to setup a cron job to read your high traffic pages every hour or so and store them as static .html files. That way the sql queries only have to run once an hour rather than every page load.