429 Too Many Requests

[Agent007]

Dear forum users,

It seems that numerous phpBB forum software is under bot-attack.

I have checked the log files and indeed only today the site has 750.000 hits so far! Some of them are from an IP range sending about 60.000 queries.

I have started manually blocking these IP addresses. Almost ALL of them come from China. According to some forum members (support on phpBB), these are AI bots that constantly download all site data for further analysis and training. Only in September notat.io has download bandwidth of almost 500 GB. That is insane.

I am working on how to find a solution, except blocking IP ranges (may happen some legal queries are blocked too).

[Agent007]

We had today 14k visitors! No idea where from all this spam is coming from. Just terrible.

Screen Shot 2025-10-09 at 00.12.15.png (30.28 KiB) Viewed 2459 times

[Magnus Johansson]

Dear site admin,

I noticed the 429 Too Many Requests the day before yesterday, and yesterday evening it was really bad; I could hardly post a comment. Now at 10 pm today there seems to be no bot-attack.

[mducharme]

I'm seeing a lot of these as well. It seems almost every time I click on a thread title to view it, I get this and have to reload.