Bots eating up all the bandwidth

[fuolo]

There is Baidu and Yandex in the list, which are also search engines and competitors of Google, relying on Google too much can backfire, but if someone doesn't want russian speaking and chinese speaking traffic then I guess it is fine also not sure about Facebook and Apple, if there can be some drawback but probably not.

[[Dimetrodon]]

Yeah, I am not sure if foreign search engines need to be blocked.

SEO companies, sure, but not actual search engines.

[JLA]

No need to pay Cloudfare or another third party. Just implement a set of logical checks in your board's code. Our phpbb2 board uses a multilayered security approach to stop most non-desireable traffic including the more recent deluge of AI harvesters. The same approach should be easy to implement on any phpbb3 board as well.

[JLA]

Another note, the facebookexternalhit and other similar meta useragents coming from Facebook IPs in the USA and Europe are bots from META stealing your content to feed there new AI engine. Best to block them or at the least only serve them the bare necessary data that is needed for Facebook shares as blocking will also prevent Facebook sharing. There are all tied into the same bots.

[thecoalman]

No need to pay Cloudfare or another third party.

The free Cloudflare plan is actually quite good. They give you most of the main features but they will limit them, e.g. I think you only get 5 custom firewall rules with the free plan but that's all I'm using with the paid plan.There is lot more they offer than just improved security, it's also provide performance.

If you wanted to take the time you can actually integrate a lot of things into phpBB, e.g. there is custom header for country of origin. You could add column for that anywhere the IP is recorded.

[nou nou]

No need to pay Cloudfare or another third party. Just implement a set of logical checks in your board's code. Our phpbb2 board uses a multilayered security approach to stop most non-desireable traffic including the more recent deluge of AI harvesters. The same approach should be easy to implement on any phpbb3 board as well.

Care to share what you built? If that doesn't compromise anything.

[potku]

No need to pay Cloudfare or another third party. Just implement a set of logical checks in your board's code. Our phpbb2 board uses a multilayered security approach to stop most non-desireable traffic including the more recent deluge of AI harvesters. The same approach should be easy to implement on any phpbb3 board as well.

I would be interested in knowing more about this, as well

I have actually never encountered how to limit unwanted traffic with just phpBB's own tools, so this sounds interesting