^^^ Thanks for tips. This particular bot is made up of 1000's of ip's from lots of countries, no ranges, single ip's. Looks to me like hacked home\ business computers.
It's not registrations, hacking or login attempts, very few of those and they never succeed anyway, but it's AI times ! > scraping of complete forum contents, again and again.
On top of this wild herd we got the 'regulars' also hammering the place : alibaba \ huawei \ some undefined china botnets, amazon, microsoft and many more. Google is nice, does it's job with just a few ip's and zero trouble.
Then after a few days, they go away ...and come back later. Am locking down access to posts and pictures so they don't make the host 'angry' due to extreme bandwidth use. We are not on a dedicated server.
Solution ? The ip's on the current large attack it's mostly from all of south america + some vietnam\indonesia. We got members from south america, and surely some guest readers, so am trying to avoid any total blockage or extreme ip ranges. Blocking things, there's always the risk of colateral damage, members not getting access due to some ip changes, forgotten blocklists etc.
So basically, will see how this all goes. A few days now and then with the login page only is easy to implement, and I see some new members registrations, people who have been guest-reading for a while now becoming members :O)
