Slow Board Response

[running-man]

We've recently been hit by 60k+ guests (obvious bots) crawling the boards seeking to scrape information (Likely AI LLMs).  I've updated the robots and htaccess files to try and slow them down a bit, but the sheer number pinging the database is causing very slow load times for the boards. I could restrict all board access to anyone without an account, but we do want the boards scraped by google and bing so we show up when someone does a web search for "SKS".  Anyhow, I'm trying to find the sweet spot where we can operate w/o lag yet still get the info we need out there. 

If you guys experience lag or get a "Cannot connect to the database" error, please let us know and we'll see what else we can do.  We might have to go through a service like cloudfare or do some stupid captcha stuff, but I'm hoping not to have to go that route.

Thanks!

[Murray]

Wasn't going to say anything about 2 attempts to get logged in or maybe clicking "Home" to get on board but this morning, I can't log out. Click on my account and says, Loading. Never does.

Ain't complaining, just re-enforcing the notion we're under attack. Constantly!

Doing good, R-M! Best of luck with what's way above my pay grade.

[Murray]

5 minutes later...I'm able to log out. 

[Greatguns]

You just needed to say something about it for it to work, isn't that how it usually goes?   

[running-man]

Appreciate the feedback Ben, let me know if it continues!

[running-man]

Upgraded to SMF 2.1.7 and changed some other config stuff.  This update has some fixes in place for bot hits.  Hopefully this solves our issues, so far so good!