What is going on? Is this some kind of widespread attack?

[LePaul]

looks like this site is using cloudflare now.


Try cloudflare its free. i had over 100k hits in an hour from bots . i switched my DNS point to cloudflare turned on my BoT attack fighter for free and my site is running smooth.


what is crazy is AWS who is who i use and other web hosting platforms should of already been on top of it. crazy but thankful for this phpbb message board being available for solutions huge company’s don’t proactively fix. probably because they want to pay for more server space (which i did) or firewalls. thank you phpbb for the help

Can you help guide me (or anyone affected reading this) on how to do this?

I can’t even log in to making changes to the forum

I do have cpanel access via GoDaddy if you can offer some steps to take - I would really appreciate it

[invenio]

Can you help guide me (or anyone affected reading this) on how to do this?

I can’t even log in to making changes to the forum

I do have cpanel access via GoDaddy if you can offer some steps to take - I would really appreciate it

I'm sure they have some kind of ip blocking interface. I would contact their customer support if you can't find it.

As for blocking the bots, you don't have to access your board, this is all server side options/changes.

[LePaul]

Blocking that IP range helped! Connections dropping

What setting in phpbb blocks bots? I think someone mentioned a permission?

[invenio]

Blocking that IP range helped! Connections dropping

What setting in phpbb blocks bots? I think someone mentioned a permission?

None really. You want to block the bots before they even have access to the board.

[LePaul]

Hopefully that works for a while I deleted/deacticated all the bots under Spider settings

[deninho32]

Huawei has been hitting my board for days now. Nothing seems to work. I've tried the Hifikabin htaccess file, no result. Installed Cloudflare with rules to block China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Nothing seems to be able to stop these bots.

[thecoalman]

I deleted/deacticated all the bots under Spider settings

Do not do this for multiple reasons. This doesn't stop them from making requests and if anything it will increase them. They will be treated as guests and since they don't accept cookies will be given an infinite amount of URL's to crawl because of the SID including links that are hidden to bots to begin with. If anything when you see a guest with bot user agent you want to add it to the bots list.

Bots that identify themselves with user agent typically obey robots.txt, you can block them with that.

https://developers.google.com/search/do ... bots/intro

[invenio]

Huawei has been hitting my board for days now. Nothing seems to work. I've tried the Hifikabin htaccess file, no result. Installed Cloudflare with rules to block China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Nothing seems to be able to stop these bots.

I put an extra entry in .htaccess for "BrowserMatchNoCase "webmaster.petalsearch.co" bad_bot" and this seems to have eliminated Huawei bots.

I also added every alibaba ip range into the ip blocker in cpanel as it looks like the bots changed their ip addresses from the other day. The guest user number dropped from a few hundred guests to 1. I'll have to see how this cat and mouse game continues.

[skybound]

I implemented Cloudbric with DDos enabled. That killed the bots, but does have a few side effects, such as ads.txt not being able to be read now by google.Also users are not mad about the 'checking your browser' that DDos option enabled.

[LePaul]

Thanks for the comments.

So, as a noob - I setup my board years ago and have just been trying to maintain it here and there - what settings in phpBB, from the Admin Control Panel, should be checked?

I know many of you are quite advanced so I'm just trying to learn and keep up with you!

Is there some particular settings I should look at in Spiders/Robots? Or in the Group forum permissions for Bots? (it looks like nothing is selected when i check)

The good news is I went from 3800 connections to 80.

GoDaddy was able to give me access to the IP Blocker in CPanel, as others showed. THANK YOU for those screen shots.

[invenio]

Thanks for the comments.

So, as a noob - I setup my board years ago and have just been trying to maintain it here and there - what settings in phpBB, from the Admin Control Panel, should be checked?

It's not there where you will be able to change things to keep bots off your site. It's going to be server settings (like the cpanel ip blocker) not a phpBB setting.

[LePaul]

Hi

Yes, I'm sure that's true.

During some of my searches, there were some posts about settings to make tho - granted the searched pulled up results a few years old.

So that's what need to asking

[invenio]

I just came to a realization. When I put these ip blocks in via cpanel, it's basically just appending those blocks to my .htaccess file.

Here is the end of my .htaccess file that has essentially blocked all these bots, I hope it can be helpful for some:

Code: Select all

# bot blocking script below this line
BrowserMatchNoCase "libwww-perl" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "wget" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "LieBaoFast" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Mb2345Browser" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "zh-CN" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "MicroMessenger" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "zh_CN" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Kinza" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Bytespider" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Baiduspider" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Sogou" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Datanyze" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "AspiegelBot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "adscanner" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "serpstatbot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "spaziodat" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "undefined" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "claudebot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "facebookexternalhit/1.1" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "meta-externalagent/1.1" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "webmaster.petalsearch.co" bad_bot
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from env=bad_bot
<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>

deny from 47.82.0.0/16
deny from 47.49.0.0/16
deny from 47.79.0.0/16
deny from 47.74.0.0/15
deny from 47.76.0.0/14
deny from 47.80.0.0/13
deny from 47.235.0.0/16
deny from 47.236.0.0/14
deny from 47.240.0.0/14
deny from 47.244.0.0/15
deny from 47.246.0.0/16
deny from 47.250.0.0/15
deny from 47.252.0.0/15
deny from 47.254.0.0/16
deny from 47.88.0.0/14
deny from 47.56.0.0/15
deny from 155.102.0.0/16
deny from 163.181.0.0/16
deny from 47.52.0.0/16
deny from 147.139.0.0/16
deny from 139.95.0.0/16
deny from 72.254.0.0/16
deny from 61.200.84.0/24
deny from 47.89.91.0/24
deny from 47.89.112.0/24
deny from 111.108.151.176/28

[deninho32]

Huawei has been hitting my board for days now. Nothing seems to work. I've tried the Hifikabin htaccess file, no result. Installed Cloudflare with rules to block China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Nothing seems to be able to stop these bots.

I put an extra entry in .htaccess for "BrowserMatchNoCase "webmaster.petalsearch.co" bad_bot" and this seems to have eliminated Huawei bots.

Yes, bye bye Huawei!

[mattash]

ever since i turned on cloudflare my site had been lighting fast.

Feb until May was awful. i lost so many users because of those bots.