[fpc-other] [fpc-pascal] Lazarus Forums not working

[Wayne Sherman]

Moving thread to:  fpc-other at lists.freepascal.org
Please remove fpc-pascal and post replies to fpc-other only.

Marc Weustink wrote:
> Yes. Last week bots made the forum unusable. Since they (till now) don't
> use cookies, I redirect all requests without cookies to the use cookies
> page. When you try this 5 times within 10 minutes, your IP is blocked
> for one hour.

Mitigation is needed, but should it block or hinder users, visitors,
and non-abusive web crawlers (legitimate search indexers and LLMs data
gathering)?

A CDN / reverse web proxy is a common solution for scaling performance
and blocking abuse and DoS attacks.  For example:

https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/cdn/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/expanding-our-support-for-oss-projects-with-project-alexandria/
https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/project-alexandria/