Anti-bot software in place

#1 Post by donald » 2025-10-27 00:44
Hello Everyone,

We are attempting to up the ante in our battle with the botnets, expansive AI crawlers and scrapers which tend to slow the forum down to unreasonable connections (I.E. Members and Guests cannot even see the forum).

Guest Views:
Last week we took the step of limiting guest views which did slow down hits on the attack surface, unfortunately this requires complete viewing of threads limited to registered members or new members.

Bot Protection:
This week we are trying out Anubis which is an open source web firewall that uses cookies and a combination of heuristics to weigh a valid user connection versus a crawler or bot. This adds another step to the viewing of the forum but not to the logon progress. There are 2 versions of the software, we are trying version I this week and the next week with refinements the other version

The software will run for a few days.

Notes:
If you are having login issues, allow the forums to set a cookie in your browser as an exception.

Feedback:
We will look at the logs to see if this additional step is obstructing members, if you are able to get past the system as a human, a 'hello' in this thread will provide valuable feedback.

Thank you,
Donald

"Fun" is something subjective, obviously.