My anti-spam plug-in keeps the spammers / scammers from registering and / or posting on this site, but the bots have been hitting this site pretty hard for the last year.
IP_Address_Ban.jpg
The IP addresses above in red have been hammering my site for over a year with sometimes 30+ connections to multiple pages / posts at the same time, often trying to access things that aren't accessible as a guest (such as user profiles) or areas that simply don't exist.
I have been content to allow this up to recently when the site performance went down and I could see 60+ guests connected, with multiple IP addresses in the same range. The range above (51.222.253.*) has been banned. As I identify the others that have been hitting the site, I will ban those as well. But the one I am showing has been a problem almost since the site went up.
It's hard to believe any system thinks this site is worth so many resources, but that's over now. Hopefully this will improve site performance over the next month or so.
Honestly, sometimes I think that some just want to cause issues, and might not be targeting anything in particular.
Quote from: JKnightandKARR on Jan 22, 2025, 01:35 AMHonestly, sometimes I think that some just want to cause issues, and might not be targeting anything in particular.
Well, either way I am keeping my eye out for these things, identifying who / where they are and banning as needed. There are three different ranges that are very consistent on my site.
It occurred to me this is a similar issue to what ZappMan is going through on the ZappBots forums (https://zappbots.altervista.org/forum/index.php). I thought for sure that if he disabled guests from accessing the forum data these "bots" would go away. But, this morning I saw 44 guests on the site and the next time I went there it was down again. I can't see who the guests are to know if any are the same bot IP ranges I have been dealing with.
always good plan