Forum Issues - Bots

Post by **Nigel Howarth** » 06 Apr 2026 16:25

Hi Everyone

Apologies, the forum's been very unstable over the past few weeks as it was being hit by massive numbers of bots (short for "robots"), which are essentially computer programs that interact with websites on their own, without needing a person to manage them constantly. Many are used to 'scrape' information from websites for training AI systems like Chat GPT.

Yesterday, I disabled many bots by using Cloudflare. Hopefully the forum will no longer be hit with these bots.

To give you an idea of how many times bots hit the forum, in the past 24 hours Cloudflare's blocked more than 153,000 (nearly 6,400/hour.)

Apologies again