I use Cloudflare at the "free" tier level. You can define web application firewall rules, though it's limited to 5 for the free tier. Prompted by this thread, I searched a bit and read this Cloudflare blog from last year: Easily manage AI crawlers with our new bot categories. In the past, I used user agent one-by-one matches to tame bots that don't respect robots.txt; this option makes it easier to "bundle" blocking rules (e.g., AI bots).Whether it's a real DDoS or malicious bots the best way to manage them is through a third party service like Cloudflare, especially for DDoS. Unfortunately that is not something easy to setup and deploy easily.
Setting up for Cloudflare does require more technical knowledge, e.g., understanding how the host/CDN topology works. But it does have the advantage of dealing with unwanted requests before they reach your server versus .htaccess rules or phpBB-based bot limiting schemes.
Statistics: Posted by HB — Thu Apr 25, 2024 9:39 pm