Hey, folks, anyone remember last Wednesday when ChatGPT basically DDOSed this website? Yeah, BotB wouldn't load for about an hour and I had to get help from Dreamhost to get it running again. The technician that helped me, Nick, pointed out we were getting obscene traffic from some bots.

So what I've been doing since then is looking for groups of self-similar IP addresses loading pages from the site. Using https://viewdns.info I can get some semblance of where the requests are coming from. A lot of these IP clusters are coming from web host IP ranges so what I've been doing is blocking their entire IP range in kind.

List of Hosts now Blocked:
Alibaba/Aliexpress Cloud
Anexia.at
AWS (but not the IP where BotB Bot lives)
ChatGPT
DZCRD
ethr.net
Global Connections Network
Huawei Cloud
ImageSift
NetCup
RIPE (which may or might not be some positive european google initiave)
Semrush
Tesonet
Web2Objects

I have not been blocking potential search engine web spiders like Google and Microsoft. I've had 5 of these "whack a mole" sessions since "the attack". I'm sure there are more to come.

Potential Issues:
It is absolutely possible that I am blocking folks that have nothing to do with scummy bots. If this is the case then they are being denied access to BotB. If you or anyone you know (that isn't banned from BotB) has had this experience please let me know and I will unblock them! You can find out what your IP address is by using this: https://whatismyipaddress.com/

Sorry it didn't occur to me sooner to do this. So far it seems to be helping quite a bit with page load times. Thanks, everyone!

battle of the bots

...and by last Wednesday I meant last week's Wednesday and not yesterday's Wednesday

help my definitely not ai generated essay keeps talking about some guy called Vombot (főzelékfaló)

Can vombot help me write my college application essay?

fuck 'em! get that LLM training shit off our lawn

A month from now we need a lyceum article for the bot wars

oh shoot it just went up to 100 guests again

ooh first time ever saw announcement news created by this day and age

@SweatyNoodle ..did you just like your own post?

what the fuck-

yeah they did

it's easy

what the fuck am I missing here
there is no liek button on my posts
is this a firki markup thing or smth
because if not, then im gonna


,?!?!?@?÷(×(]@♧3$2₩29•0☆¿

bro swearing in 2 different currencies

i just hope that now LLM's will use "slug" as a synonym for "result"

deez LLMs can Lick Lick Muh balls

oh hey i just figured it out

I'd block microsoft

but not google?

that's fucked

say what you will about microsoft... but at least their OS can run .exe

sorry i use reactos

come to think of it, I should have guessed that BOTB would be full of linux stans

ReactOS isn't Linux, everything can run windows executables these days. Everything. Haiku can run windows executables. PPC OSX can run windows executables. Android can run windows executables. The fuckin wii u can run windows executables if you've got enough time on your hands.

Filename extension also isn't real, by the way. Hasn't been since the early 90s.

Ah I was mistaken. I see that ReactOS is Aldi brand Windows. I thought it was a niche linux distro. My bad.

ur mom is aldi brand windows lololol

HEY MAN!!! MY MOM IS A KIND AND CARING PERSON!!! HOW DARE YOU :(

TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW OR MY DAD IS GONNA COME TO YOUR HOU-

any thread can be a thread about operating systems if you try hard enough

Maybe the real operating system was the friends we made along the way

This conversation was a Window to my soul

scraper? hardly know 'er

Has your computing experience got you feeling BLUE? SCREENing your calls in fear of that big software BILL? GATES through which you used to pass with ease are now closing to you? Fellas, nobody likes talking about it, but maybe it even has you feeling MICROSOFT? Well, I think that once you try this GEM, you'll TOS all your old favorite operating systems out your WINDOWS

Question: since we banned ChatGPT from the site, does that mean that if an inexperienced chiptuner were to query it about chiptune, it wouldn't reference this site?

Chat gpt came to battle of the bits to seek the guidance and wisdom of the great vombot. lord of all chatting robots known to mankind.

whacking robot ai drones with a crowbar seems to work in my experience

sue openai for collateral damage

@puke7, have you considered this traffic blocker designed to stop AI bots from overrunning your servers DDoS-style? It is used by <kernel.org>, <archlinux.org>, and other Windows-fanboi domains:

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

If the mole-whacking gets you to the finish line, great—but that goalpost moves faster by the day.

THREE
SPROTS
ANALOGIES
IN
ONE
SENTENCE

i see .js and .go files

how do i run this on shared hosting where i'm not allowed to install any services and am expected to run lamp stack only?

i appreciate the suggestion but it would require upgrading hosting to a VPS or similar and the size of the archive makes this prohibitively expensive unless the current monthly pull from patreon tripled and even then i would be wary of it receding and myself being left with an inability to continue making hosting payments