Good morning everyone. Just a quick heads up that I've banned a good chunk of IP space in China due to abusive traffic.
I've tried to restrict this where possible to datacenter blocks from Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba, but China Telecom / Mobile were also heavy sources of suspicious traffic. I doubt we have many (if any) users in China, but if you are affected please let me know.
This has been ongoing for a while and I ignored it initially since the traffic levels were low, but it wasn't anymore.
The ban has very visibly cut our traffic levels:
Did this spike for you these past weeks? I'm not sure if it just happens to be our instance's turn or if they have up-scaled their efforts. I have been playing wack-a-mole with IP ranges.
I ended up turning up the cloudflare challenge mode on old.lemmy.ca and that sorted most of it. Haven't noticed anything since then.
That's good! There's some hope that this won't last forever then. Thanks.
And it's interesting that the challenge via old.lemmy.ca was so impactful. The first wave of bots that I noticed also came through an Mlmym front-end that I make accessible via tor. But lately they have been hitting directly via the regular front-end.