UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Version 7/8 Support Prevent anonymous users from browsing old threads?

We have a persistent problem with bots on our forum. MASSIVE distributed crawls that appear as legitimate requests (spoofed user agents etc.). Anyways, we've not been able to migrate our site to CloudFlare yet for unrelated reasons. In the mean-time, it may help to reduce the number of pages that are accessible to an anonymous user. Is there a way to allow only logged in users to view older threads. Or - is there any kind of rate limiting feature? Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Andrew

Old posts serve as great "food" for search engines and search engine exposure; if you rely on Search Engines for traffic this is something I would completely avoid.

As you mentioned, CloudFlare is an excellent option and will stop a significant amount of bogus/abusive/spam traffic when properly configured.

We don't have permissions for this however you could make an archive forum with the only view access being members (through permissions) and move old content into said archive forum.

Couldn't you set up the Group Permissions so that you can only view if you're logged in? IOW, the Users group has view permissions (which they should already have) but the Guests group has no view permissions.

If you only want to stop views for older posts, you'd have to setup a "mirror" forum (e.g. a forum named General would have a mirror named GeneralArchive.) Then you move all the old threads to the archive forum and set perms there so Guests have no view access. This would be a lot of work if you have a lot of forums, but it is a possible solution to your problem.

I agree with Gizmo. Your best option is to move to Cloudflare, but you state that you can't do that right now.

FYI, I discovered Cloudflare "Turnstile", which allows you to protect any page on your site (you don't need have your domain on Cloudflare). You just need to have a Cloudflare account and a key. It is a bit of code and setup, but it's working great in my testing - the site still gets hits from bots, but they are stopped immediately rather than triggering full forum pages which was causing excessive load.