Forum Availability / BOT Attacks

[phil]

Hi All,

The forums have been under massive load recently from AI Bot/Scrapers that are killing the server.
Ultimately, I think the forums software itself could be better, and I have made a few manual tweaks to it which should help. But until they release a new version with better protection, I'm a little bit stuck.

I'm not sure what these bots are trying to achieve, but bringing down the website is hardly constructive.

I have therefore had to implement some advanced detection and blocking.
There are certain tell tale signs that it is bot activity (particularly after my tweaks) so I hope it will only target these bot networks and not the average genuine user. But it will block all access from the apparent BOT's /16 subnet (that's a huge number of IP addresses) for 15 minutes. I hope that's enough to discourage them and at the same time not affect normal users at all (or too much).

If you have problems accessing the forums - then bear this in mind, it may be related (but then how would you read this?!).
If in doubt, and you cant access the forums properly or reliably, contact me on the XMBC Discord Channel or by email if there is an ongoing problem.