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Forum slow and timing out

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Robbbert:
I've noticed this a lot recently. It seems your forum is being assaulted by thousands of AI bots.

Just now when I visited: 9219 Guests, 2 Users (0 Buddies)

PL1:

--- Quote from: Robbbert on April 27, 2026, 10:13:53 pm ---I've noticed this a lot recently. It seems your forum is being assaulted by thousands of AI bots.

Just now when I visited: 9219 Guests, 2 Users (0 Buddies)

--- End quote ---
Yes, the number of bots has greatly increased since approximately July 2024.

If you look at the bottom section of the forum stats page, there have been several times since then where the forum has had 20k - 26k online at a time.   :o
https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?action=stats

There's an average of about 2 spam accounts created per day, so it appears that the majority of the bots are data scrapers digging through the 1.73 million posts here to train/inform Large Language Model AIs or data brokers or scammers.

Not sure if there's any practical way for the BYOAC servers to prioritize real humans over bots/scammers/spammers.   :dunno


Scott

pbj:
This forum has gotten so aggressively difficult to use it’s hard to believe.  Atari Age, of all places, feels like living in the future. 

Robbbert:
The usual way to block the bots is to use Cloudflare or another similar service. The downside of this is that they only permit the use of the latest version of current browsers. Also (I think) http won't work, or will be redirected to https.

Or, do a geoblock of China and Russia and see if things improve.

But, right now, the forum is working fine.

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