Bit of vacuum cleaning to get rid of the scum of internet.

=> 56 user profiles had spam-links only contents in their About Me page (mostly India, Pakistan, Indonesia and USA).

=> 13 profiles had spams message posted and/or later updated to spam.

=> Made a better search to find hidden forum spams => 6 more accounts deleted.

Total = 75 accounts gone that we won't miss.

Julien

Additionally.... if you felt the website response time was slower than usual in the past few days, it was.

We had 2 players frantically harvesting (90% of the traffic was only for these 2) every pages on this website at high speed, bringing the database and web-server to its knees at times.

Who are they?

• OpenAI (yeah, the ChatGPT guys)
• ByteDance (as in TikTok)

OpenAI => IP blocked (20.15.240.102 from Microsoft) + robots.txt updated to "disallow /" for GPTBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/gptbot

ByteDance being a Chinese company was more interesting as I block ALL official IPs coming from China (they are 99.99% hack attempts/spammers).
But they were accessing via AWS Singapore => Whole /14 subnet blocked + robots.txt updated to "disallow /" for Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com

Julien

That was only the beginning of the AI madness.

Since then I had to block:

• Googlebot (!)
• Amazonbot
• Alibaba USA

Julien