ClassicConnect

nick99nack · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2025 1:00 pm Post subject: Internet Bots

This place has been hit with a near constant swarm of bots over the last couple months. They don't seem to be slowing the site down at all, but there is constant traffic. It almost seems to be hacked routers or something, as most of the traffic comes from residential IPs, all over the world.

Have you noticed an increase in bot traffic?

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LyraNovaHeart · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2025 1:08 pm Post subject:

According to the stats, it's gone exponentially up, back when I first registered it was like 2,000 bots at best, now we're up to 5,125 as a record. What's weird to me is that there are points where they just kind of... give up? No idea If that's the bots getting banned for failing the sign up, or if they just stop for a while.
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nick99nack · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2025 1:17 pm Post subject:

Yeah, it's very strange. The bots seem to crawl the site for a while and then all go away, but then come right back again a few hours or days later.

I can't figure out what they're actually doing either. They seem to just be clicking on page links.

I might need to start blocking certain sections of the world, but I also don't want to lock out actual people.
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

VCSMaster · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2025 3:56 am Post subject:

I don't know if there's a good way to remove the traffic, since you would still have to process the requests to know that they are spam. You might ask your ISP to do something about this insted, though. Maybe they have a filter somewhere, since they surely have a list of known bot addresses?

nick99nack · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2025 7:49 pm Post subject:

VCSMaster · Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2025 7:28 pm Post subject:

Ha, if I had more friends who were interested in retrocomputing and reliving the days of forums, they would already be here. I'm just about the only person I know who is interested in old computers specifically.

If it helps, I submitted your side to the Sloop classic website directory, so maybe you will get more traffic there.

nick99nack · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2025 3:04 am Post subject:

Heh, thanks! I just looked that place up. Had never heard of Sloop before. Pretty neat site.

I know exactly what you mean. It's tough finding people also into old tech, especially phones and dial-up and stuff.
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

VCSMaster · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2025 4:58 am Post subject:

Yep, I keep up with a lot of random retro sites. I enjoy my classic computing shenanigans mostly because I enjoy reliving my time on the early internet, and because I much prefer the UI/UX of older sites and applications. Mac OS 9 and Windows XP are my happy places, for sure.

Yeah, finding people who actually want to use old computers, let alone for the things they were intended for are few and far between. Most people who have nostalgia for the old internet also seem to be satisfied with watching era appropriate meme videos on Youtube and seeing screenshots of old layouts. Most of the retrocomputing world these days is tailored towards retrogaming!

Bryn · Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2025 7:00 pm Post subject:

My forum was also swamped by many bots, but this happened in the middle of May right after I amended the meta tags (as to make it more discoverable). At first I thought it was a bunch of organic users but when I saw a shit-load of them from Brazil, India and Pakistan, and that some came on with a bizarre Safari/Windows user agent (as shown on the Online Users List), then I realised something wasn't right.

And it then came to my attention that many of them could be AI bots here to scrape content and that many of them had actually accessed the forum from an expired session, and the solution to that was implementation of CloudFlare Turnstile (something that John, who manages the forum software my forum uses, had enable at his end). This helped keep the numbers way down and that only legit visitors can get through.

If it were to happen again, you better keep your guard up, Nick.

nick99nack · Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2025 8:59 pm Post subject:

I can't tell if they're AI scraping bots or some giant botnet, or a mixture of both. Some of them do try to register here but immediately fail due to my advanced bot blocking system on the registration page.

Most of the AI bots from well known companies have been well-behaved so far. The rest of what I've been seeing lately have been from Iran and Brazil and a ton of other places, and they appear to be residential IPs.

I don't want to add cloudflare here, as it can break older browsers from accessing the site. I would also need to rewrite more of the site if I wanted to use the cloudflare proxy, as that proxy breaks session management.

Thankfully they don't seem to be causing the site to slow down at all, so for now I'm mostly going to keep an eye on them, and slowly implement more bot blocking features.

As I'm writing this now, the bots have gone away. There are only two people browsing this site! I'm sure they'll be back though...
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

Bryn · Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2025 1:23 pm Post subject: