Many BOT DAY ~ status updates!

[Melooon]

Hello! This is a historic archive and info thread for BOT DAY ~ the day MANY bots arrived at the forum!

As of writing 6000 bots are hitting the forum; from what I can tell they are all coming from unique IP ~ I do not believe these are AI scrapers or company addresses ~ at a guess it seems a lot like some sort of DDoS attack

At any rate; I have locked down the forum so guests cannot currently access most services ~ there server is running slow but I think its good for now. There is no danger to logged in members other than slowness!

We are processor bound, but RAM usage on the forum is still under 50% so I think we can simply weather this one out 

Good luck 

EDIT: Connections from Singapore, Brazil and Vietnam are currently blocked, this seems to have reduced the number of bots greatly!

[Memory]

I was getting payed today and I Was planing on buying Java Edition Minecraft so I could join the server it says its shut down?
is that bc of the bots? and if so then when do you think that will be fixed

⚑ Moderators Note ⚑

Edited ~ please avoid using quotes unnesseseraly and edit quotes down to a minimum quotes text

[Melooon]

Minecraft so I could join the server it says its shut down?

The forum seems to be having issues displaying its status, but the MC server is unrelated to the forum server and it is totally not offline ^^ It should work just fine!

EDIT:
Added updates; most guest features are now back! Blocked regions will remain closed until Monday, however for now I think things are back to normal! 

Also I fixed the minecraft status widget!

[BlackMageGaming]

~ I do not believe these are AI scrapers or company addresses ~

Nonetheless, it's a good reminder to keep your robots.txt file updated! Although I do have to admit that I don't entirely understand how it works. Not to mention with every corporation making their own AI scrapers, it would be really difficult to keep 100% functional.
  

[Melooon]

robots.txt file updated! Although I do have to admit that I don't entirely understand how it works

There is a discussion about it here: https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=3916.msg38740#msg38740

In general one of the only things that can be done in situations is to block the IPs of known bots and bot hosting companies. I've been digging into the IPs from today's bot attack and most of them are owned by the Alibaba Group ~ In the future I may block all Alibaba Group IPs; that's not great if they happen to be your internet provider (though we don't get a lot of real traffic from them), but that's just one of the downsides of poorly regulated internet providers and the risks they pose to the wider web

[Memory]

i feel really bad for the genuine people from those countries tryna access - but i guess it makes sense.

there's a little over 2000 members and there's... over 6000 bots? jesus that's over half of the current total number of members.
i really hope it's not a DDoS attack 
also i wonder why so many bots try targeting this forum specifically? does it happen on others too or mostly just this one?

edit: many days later edit lmao but still
it seems to be with various other forums and things too which is concerning - thankfully Pokefarm Q didn't get hit but a number of places did at least afaik.

[Malice]

This is odd, ProBoards forums had DDoS attacks today as well I wonder what's going on or why people would DDoS random forums of all things, but I'm glad this was handled pretty quick! Thanks Melon

[Melooon]

I can give an update on this! From what I can tell the wave of bots is still going on although it has reduced a little. Currently all Alibaba Cloud servers are blocked as well as most of Vietnam. I've allowed all traffic from Brazil because I think people from there do use the site (these lockouts also effect TamaNOTchi) ~ we currently have about 900 bots from Brazil hitting the forum, this is manageable so far and seems to be having no real effect on forum speed, but I have disabled some features for Guests such as the Spotlight and Snappy Search because they use extra processing!

[candycanearter07]

Is that why I can't access the forum using my home wifi?