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Bots overloading old.lemmy.today (lemmy.today)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by mrmanager@lemmy.today to c/lemmytoday@lemmy.today
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Hi,

We had a DDOS attack against old.lemmy.today which overloaded the entire server for about 20 minutes. I had to turn off old.lemmy.today temporarily and will look through logs and probably block more chinese ip ranges, since thats where it came from.

Always something to do. :) Keeping this as sticky for a while to inform everyone.

Edit: I added more ip blocks for Chinese networks and hopefully it will keep future bots away. Bringing up the old.lemmy.today user interface again...

Edit 2: Had to take it down again due to massive bot scraping. Currently down.

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[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

seems like it's working again but with anubis.. maybe can we just have something like http basic auth with a public password? (like have the password prompt as "type lemmy")

i don't think anubis is a good solution. it's very trivially bypassed though maybe good enough to block stupid generic bots..

see also https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html

[-] mrmanager@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago

Ok now its working and seemingly blocking bots, but we will see over time how well this works. Like you said, im sure its possible to bypass but maybe it improves the situation somewhat still.

[-] mrmanager@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago

Its not really working yet, it keeps popping up the "seeing if you are a bot" message all the time.

But yeah, working on it. If it can prevent dumb bots, its a win for sure.

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
66 points (100.0% liked)

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