BBS was down today due to "Exceeding Bandwidth"

[FlyingPenguin]

Seems like we had a very misbehaved AI training bot scraping our forums, and causing us to use 10 times our normal bandwidth the last few months.

The host added a user agent block on their end, and I've added AI bot blocks to my ROBOTS.TXT file.

Let's see if that helps.

Welcome to the AI revolution.

[Pugsley]

Oh boy an AI trained on this place? Could have hilarious results.

[Executioner]

AI - we are all doomed

[FlyingPenguin]

Here's the message I got from our host's tech support, who responded very quickly to my trouble ticket today:

There has been an ongoing issue with AI training bots scraping web forums which are not well-behaved and can actually cause a denial of service type of issue. I've added a user agent block to prevent that on your account as one of those bots was hitting the site very heavily.

The amount of traffic hitting the server as a whole dropped dramatically after blocking the AI bot, I'll keep the ticket and check on it periodically tonight.

[Losbot]

Those damn Cyberdyne a-holes!