Moving thread to:
Please remove fpc-pascal and post replies to fpc-other only.

Marc Weustink wrote

Yes. Last week bots made the forum unusable. Since they (till now) don't use cookies, I redirect all requests without cookies to the use cookies page. When you try this 5 times within 10 minutes, your IP is blocked for one hour.

Mitigation is needed, but should it block or hinder users, visitors, and non-abusive web crawlers (legitimate search indexers and LLMs data gathering)?

A CDN / reverse web proxy is a common solution for scaling performance and blocking abuse and DoS attacks. For example:

https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/cdn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/expanding-our-support-for-oss-projects-with-project-alexandria/ https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/project-alexandria/

I know how to reproduce this now.

Once access is restored, it continues,
even if I close pages on the forum and access other websites.

However, if I close Firefox and restart it, PHPSESSIDs appear on all the URLs.

"Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" is NOT checked!

Cheers,
Peter

Wayne Sherman wrote

Mitigation is needed, but should it block or hinder users, visitors, and non-abusive web crawlers (legitimate search indexers and LLMs data gathering)?

Someone with write access to the forum web server can login to Google Search Console in order to monitor and view the status of Google web crawler bot and index:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en https://search.google.com/search-console/about