To be honest, I'm not sure. If it's a DDOS it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking like a misbehaving web crawler. On the other hand, if it's a misbehaving web crawler, it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking somewhat like a DDOS.
Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.
That's just the Internet now. 99%+ of web traffic is AI crawlers that are 100x more aggressive than any search engine crawler used to be. Try https://anubis.techaro.lol/.
Blacklisting every Chinese IP address probably also works since anybody using this site from China ought to know how to use a VPN. But there are plenty of these bots outside China too, so that's only a middling solution.
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Notes -
It's not just you. Working on it. :)
(Should be better now, I'll let it sit for half an hour or so and see how it's going. More work may be needed.)
(Edit: Sigh, not solved. Still working on it.)
(This may now be fixed; I think we were just running on bad hardware.)
Was this an intentional DDOS attack on the site?
To be honest, I'm not sure. If it's a DDOS it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking like a misbehaving web crawler. On the other hand, if it's a misbehaving web crawler, it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking somewhat like a DDOS.
Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.
That's just the Internet now. 99%+ of web traffic is AI crawlers that are 100x more aggressive than any search engine crawler used to be. Try https://anubis.techaro.lol/.
Blacklisting every Chinese IP address probably also works since anybody using this site from China ought to know how to use a VPN. But there are plenty of these bots outside China too, so that's only a middling solution.
And Chinese botmasters could just buy VMs at any non-Chinese cloud provider. Which they probably already do.
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