Comment by scoofy

I run a little wiki and, holy shit, the bots have gotten advanced. Like, it used to be no big deal, then like a year and a half ago, it exploded. It's basically quadrupled the costs for me to run the site. It's not even worth it to ban IPs anymore, because they are routing their traffic through different IPs -- in different countries -- just to scan my site, repeatedly, every damn day. It's an obscure golf course wiki, but no... better check every other day to see if anything has changed!

At the same time, the bots are dumb as hell. I have honey pots that basically are as simple as "if you visit this obscure, hidden URL you're banned" or "if the same obscure page for a course is visited for four different courses in a row, then ban all the IPs that were part of that." But they keep coming... like, an infinite number of IPs. I genuinely don't want to use Cloudflare, but I understand why people do. It's absolutely crazy out there.