Was hit by Alibaba last weekend nearly 2000 guests. Hosting company shutdown my forum temporarily and restored it with a limit on performance. I removed all the connections via the database ...It's companies trying to harvest data to load into their AI chatbots.I've been thinking about this lately, because Chinese bots are going nuts to the point where, if it was convenient, I'd simply block all of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore (yes, lots of them operate out of Singapore IP's too).
My forum got overloaded for about two weeks (nobody could get on - the SQL server tripped out after it got to 100 percent usage) and we tracked down the IP addresses to Tencent. It wasn't personal. They don't even know who I am. But clearly there were some useful keywords on my forum and they wanted to harvest all the questions and answers, so that they could make money from selling advice given by my users to other users.
I did block all of the ranges of IP addresses that Tencent owns in the world and that made the problem go away. But they are not the only tech bro company out there.
This isn't the same situation as search engine bots, that burn up your resources, but give you new users in return. These AI bot companies are in a war with each other and want to harvest data - any data - as fast as they can.
I would rather have Cloudflare blocking Tencent than have my hosting company's server block Tencent, because bouncing bad bots still uses up resources. And if you get ten thousand times your normal traffic, that is maybe going to burn up your monthly bandwidth and cost you money.
(A friend of mine with a website that didn't have a forum on it got raided to. He had a deal set up with his hosting company to automatically switch to a more expensive plan to cover temporary spikes in demand and it ended up costing him a ton of cash to pay for bots to raid his website. So I think bot raiding is becoming a big problem and people are going to need to have severs set up to be defensive.)
Tencent keeps hitting my forum too. It seems to use a bot referred to as thinkbot but like all Chinese companies doesn't comply with robots.txt. My hosting company can't or won't block Countries so I think it will be down to my adding their ip ranges.
I changed my Guest access to limit which folders are accessible to but I still see references to guest accounts 'posting' or downloading from folders they should not have access to.
Statistics: Posted by a3035oc_web — Sat Jul 05, 2025 8:49 am