phpBB Discussion • Blocking bots that flood my phpBB with requests

I have a phpBB forum that has been running fine for 15 years but starting a few days ago, the forum suddenly receives myriads of requests from bots which slow down the whole forum and make it hardly usable. The bots aren't trying to register as new users or anything, they are just flooding phpBB with requests of random forum sites like 30 times per second which slows the forum down and also often causes HTTP 503 errors.

The Apache log file is now more than 650 megabytes for 24 hours, before the bot problem started it used to be around 50 megabytes. The problem is that the bots use many different IP addresses so I can't just go and block certain IP addresses in my .htaccess file to solve the problem because the traffic comes from too many different IP addresses. I've done a
call on the Apache log to find out recurring IP addresses and this was the result:
As you can see, the most frequent IP address came up merely 9768 times which is not much for a 24 hour period and also considering the fact that the whole Apache log file is 2172533 lines. So I don't really know how I can solve this problem because the requests apparently come from many many different IP addresses

What can I do here to solve the problem? Can anybody help? Thanks!

Statistics: Posted by andyphp82 — Fri Feb 28, 2025 9:47 am

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