Ongoing Problem with Bots / Reading Forum when Not Logged In

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Looks like all our bot friends are back:

• In total there are 1040 users online :: 3 registered, 1 hidden and 1036 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[jgharston]

Yeah, I spoke too soon about my site as well. The swamping has overtaken the php code on my main site as well as the wiki - even the 403.php error page fails to run, so causing the 403.php page to be fetched, which fails to run, so... etc....

On switching the Wiki off, the main site runs fine. I've downloaded the logs, and there's gigabytes of spam fetches.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

jgharston wrote:

Yeah, I spoke too soon about my site as well. The swamping has overtaken the php code on my main site as well as the wiki - even the 403.php error page fails to run, so causing the 403.php page to be fetched, which fails to run, so... etc....

On switching the Wiki off, the main site runs fine. I've downloaded the logs, and there's gigabytes of spam fetches.

You are not alone, my friend...

• In total there are 1042 users online :: 3 registered, 1 hidden and 1038 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
  Most users ever online was 3457 on Wed Jun 25, 2025 5:03 pm

[L0uis.m]

Hello 0010 all,

I don't want to count our chickens before they hatch, but...
Am I seeing correctly that the number of visitors has calmed down (now ≈165) ?

Edit 08 Jul.: I cheered too early, this morning over 2000

N.B.:
I also suspect that the *. site recently had a similar incident.
On Tuesday May 20 the number of visitors suddenly rose to 4049, now ≈144!

[Broti]

Similar situation over at the VIC 20 Forum Denial.
It's currently closed for guests due to Bots eating away the bandwidth.

[L0uis.m]

Hello 0010 all,

It seems to me that the forums affected by these bots are primarily about computers; other forums I visit seem to have been left alone so far.

Could it be a selective search for data related to (digital?) electronics, like a company (or some foreign agency) that is using A.I. to specifically search for "clever" electronic designs ?

Or am I seeing ghosts here ?

[Mike Naberezny]

The bot traffic continues but after blocking some additional IP ranges in China, the load is no longer such that it makes the forum unusable for members. I have re-enabled anonymous reading and will leave it enabled as long as the forum remains usable.

[BigEd]

Thanks Mike! Appreciate all the care and attention behind the scenes!

[orac81]

Yes I second that thanks. At the moment a number of forums (vic20, zx, etc) are "member only" and all that useful knowledge on those platforms disappears from the search engines.

[GlennSmith]

I add my thanks also, Mike. You've been doing this for a looooong time for us!
Friday August 29th 08:54 European time :

Loud echo sound. On the wall is the word XYZZY. There are coins on the floor.

All_alone.png (5.3 KiB) Viewed 3626 times

For the moment, the bots seem to have gone looking elsewhere.

[orac81]

An article on this has appeared on Slashdot:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/3 ... ining-data

And on The Register:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/ ... estroying/

[L0uis.m]

Besides the problems on the web,

In the part of the country where I live, there are build huge ugly Data Centre amidst beautiful green fields, some of those centre consume more electricity than our capitol city. And we pay for it by higher price and shortage of energy, suppliers say "the grid is overloaded" and they build more landscape disfiguring high-voltage networks, all to feed A.I.

[CommodoreZ]

Seems that all of the small vintage computer community forums I frequent are feeling the pressure of the scraping bots lately. I know my own website's traffic records have been inundated with bots rotating their user agent strings to mask their scraping operations. It makes it more difficult to pay attention to my actual visitor statistics.

[J64C]

Ugh, I’ve seen this forum go down a fair bit lately too. Really don’t know what the answer is for this, bots and AI scraping is somewhat relentless.

[No True Scotsman]

I noticed that some users are linking to resources hosted on Mastodon. If they are also posting links to 6502.org pages on Mastodon, you'll see a flurry of about 200 Mastodon bots hitting the linked page all at once to build the link preview (page title, meta description, and lead photo) seen in social media posts.

Mastodon nodes apparently don't trust each other implicitly when building a description of a remote page. Each node in the network sends its own bot to scrape the page and build the link preview for itself. When the linked page is on a forum, this results in thread view counts suddenly increasing by 200 or so when the link is posted on Mastodon.

This isn't intentional spamming or scraping, but it is quite annoying to sysops who rely on thread view counts to gauge interest.

As I recall, the bots go by a name other than "Mastodon," but I don't remember the name. I ultimately ended up blocking all bots associated with Mastodon on my old forum.