Hey all, I have a website with a forum attached to it. The forum was for testing purposes only, but has been overrun with bots and is chewing up my monthly bandwidth and screwing with my traffic history. If I remove the forums from my site, will it stop bots from coming back after they realise there are no forums anymore? Is it that easy? Thanks, ~Jebus
It will help a lot. If the forum is for testing purposes only, you can restrict access (using .htaccess for example) only to certain IP addresses, and to others return HTTP error 404 page without counting stats on that page. A simple 404 page can be as small as cca 200 bytes including headers, so your bandwidth will be safe (compared to current situation, in which you deliver complete forum page or even multiple pages, that are likely to have tens of kilobytes each). And of course, more clever bots will retreat once they see 404 error page. However, not all bots are clever and if there are links to that forum, you will receive some traffic to it.
Yes, but again - to a certain extent. CloudFlare does have smart caching which blocks some of the bots that try to pass through. However they also advise its not a full-proof method and you need to block IP's additionally if you want to maximize the positive results.
I'd figure I'd wait till I saw some changes before replying, but first off, thanks for all the replies. After deleting the forums, I have seen Daily Hits drop from 33k down to 17k then down to 7k until it's leveled out to 600. Thanks for all your help!