In future best to not post referral links, or at least disclose this in your commentary.

Recent issues appear to be AI bots scraping lemmy content, posing as legitimate user traffic.

The difference between this and a regular DDoS is the intent behind it. I don’t believe the traffic we’re seeing is intended to be malicious as with a DDoS, but due to the incompetence of those behind the scraping… it effectively is a DDoS.

Cloudflare’s security features are serving us very well:

The red line shows the blocks put in place stopping a recent surge in hits. If the blocks weren’t in place, AZ would likely be almost entirely offline.

It works without Internet too…

Thanks, that confirms some of the changes I’ve made are working.

Thanks for posting, good to confirm it’s working as expected.

I’ve made further changes… what app do you usually use? Worth trying again now, please let me know how it goes.

I’m still working to relax the restrictions… unfortunately it’s very difficult to differentiate legitimate users traffic from the bots.

Since you guys are so active… how has the site felt for the last hour or so? Any issues?

How is everyone finding AZ performance for the last hour or so?

I’ve expanded the cloudflare challenges to all non Australian requests. This has made a massive impact… I’ll look at ways to relax this tonight.

For now users outside Australia will receive a cloudflare challenge in their browser. Lemmy apps will likely not function.

Yes, amongst other things.

And more stuff blocked today. Lemmy seems to be drawing more and more attention from various misbehaved bots/scrapers etc.

Generic, non-lemmy traffic.

I’ve added jenny.nya.pub, fun.with.kyun.li, and red.computersforpeace.net to our instance blocklist.

You’ve reminded me I should donate again, its been a while… though one small correction, O- is not the most common at all. It makes up under ~10% of the population as a rule: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/blood-types

Another web scraping bot blocked.

So this is still going on now. I’ve expanded the block to catch more of the dodgy traffic.

Not from Australia.

IP? No. Country, ASN and user agent? Yes. Which now will receive a captcha.