Bot Wars

[DaystarNemesis]

Not even talking Transformers or Robo-Kaiju here (although I fully accept these as additional conversational lines). The 'who's online' page is full of bots!! I laud the people handling this! Although, admittedly, I know little enough about it to know what's a good bot, what's a bad bot, and what's a harmless bot. That's what I'd like to discuss here!

[galled]

Bots (clankers) do come in malicious incarnations (trying to break in and steal stuff), but this has been happening since the first severs and we've automated countermeasures for those.

Scraper bots (spiders/crawlers) have their jobs and if they're well behaved we're fine with them.

This latest bunch come in hoards doing nothing but taking up bandwidth. (I can't think of why other than to deny legit traffic.) DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks are par for the course, and DDOS (Distributed e.g. multiple origin points) attacks are common and thwartable.

What's different now is they're coordinated from around the world in a new way I haven't seen before (me thinks AI driven--be very wary of AI is my general view). While I can't prove a connection, the timing is suspect. I'll leave that at that.

My biggest question is why Windlyn of all targets? <sigh>

The good news is we've made progress... so far, so good... waiting for the next wave. Back to bot patrol!

[DaystarNemesis]

galled
That was very helpful information. Let me know if there's anything I can do!

[galled]

We (Winners) appreciate that! I think the best thing we can do is carry on and perhaps be understanding if the bots figure out a way around our latest (it's not inevitable, but the devious out there never sleep and we have to). The cat and mouse games continue... ggg

[DaystarNemesis]

galled
Hmm. I would say it would not be invalid to presume sites like this one to be practice for larger fish, if I were pressed for a possible reason behind it. What would something like that look like, and how do I tell you if I see it?

[galled]

Other than 503 errors I really don't know. They're locked out of everything by default now (must register to see anything). What I do know is everyone and their brothers are scraping sites to train their AI and since using data from the usual suspects (google etc) is now off limits or soon to be (same garbage in same garbage out), so they're scraping their own. So our waves are just bad bots (clumsy) or malicious. Perhaps both.

If you get 503 errors, please note the time. I can check the logs and go from there. We currently send offenders to the bad bot no-no box, but we let them out after a while. If they keep coming back we'll have to ban them. I really hate to do that if their clients were hijacked (virus').

Thanks for your interest and support!

[DaystarNemesis]

You can count on me!