Banning web access by IP

[joepal]

I've had to ban an address forcefully today for loading the site with tens of request per second with what looked like a site crawler. This slowed down the forum to snail pace.

It is perfectly allowed to crawl the site, and search bots to this regularly. But the general agreement is that you should then abide by what is specified in http://www.makehumancommunity.org/robots.txt, particularly the crawl-delay setting.

[green_tomato]

Not sure where to report this, but there seems to be a new spam strategy going on lately. And there's a lot of it right now (january 2024).
Spammers probably don't care about the robots.txt

You'll see a user log in, make one single post that sounds almost relevant. But if you click "Reply with quote" you'll see that the posts ends with a slightly hidden spam link, like this:

Code: Select all

[quote]
 ... bla bla ...
[size=1][url=https://spam.com][color=white]i am spam[/color][/url][/size][/quote]

As a rule of thumb, if someone creates a new user, and the first post they make contains a link, then it's probably spam.