I didn't want to have to CDN up, but the botnet is really not giving me many options :-( I guess the upside is that it seems pretty effective at weeding them out.
3 years ago
I guess some really dumb spammer could be pointing their generic spam tool at your page. But wow that's a lot of requests. I hope it's not just someone jealous of your project. 路 3 years ago
I was looking into stuff like that, and it might have been viable with less volume, but was getting upward of 50k hits an hour, and the trend was increasing pretty steeply. It was already six times more than when I was on the front page of hacker news, even just serving static HTML there's a point where self-hosting on domestic broadband starts to choke :-( 路 3 years ago
I realise this feels like fighting a losing battle (you might be right), but since this is a low-traffic non-commercial service, there must be a point at which the effort to bot exceeds the value. It's hard to imagine any sane payback from what they're doing, except to mine your index for good links. 路 3 years ago
If you change the form details, how long before a human picks up on this. e.g., 'subscribe to our mailing list' looks (to a bot) like the search form, and the actual search form looks (to a bot) like a mailing-list subscribe form. You'd glean information from this, including immediate feedback on bot traffic (any 'subscribe' submission that doesn't contain an email address is almost certainly a bot).
Do bot request currently precede a get/post search submission with a form-page request? If so, is there any pattern in the time difference between getting the form and posting? 路 3 years ago
Guess we just can't have nice things on the Internet. 路 3 years ago
'CDN up' carries connotations of an improvement, whereas this news is kinda depressing. 路 3 years ago