Comment by hombre_fatal

I don't want to serve the traffic at all. It's a popular forum that I run out of charity.

I would have to upgrade my infrastructure to serve 30x the traffic just for bots. And it's traffic that busts my cache because it hits all over my forum at once, like deep into page 64 of topics made years ago.

Or, I can use CloudFlare to block the bots.

I was referring to web hosts offering DDoS protection. Basically all of them null route you if you receive a big enough volumetric attack, even the ones that claim to offer DDoS protection.

Also, whether AI is behind specific DDoS current events isn't relevant to the point of AI bots multiplying automated internet traffic.

These work against the claim that the internet without CF would be a mere difference in captchas which is dismissive of real challenges faced by the modern internet.