Bot Busters: Defending Your Site Against Bots
TL;DR: A climate change portal faced performance issues due to excessive bot crawling. After trying various solutions, including updating core and modules, scaling up the server, and exploring different security modules, the problem was solved using Drupal's built-in Ban module to block problematic IP addresses. The Autoban module was then implemented to automate the process, effectively improving the site's performance and resilience against bots. 🌐 Introduction In today's digital landscape, websites face numerous challenges, and one of the most persistent is the threat of bots. These automated programs can wreak havoc on your site's performance, especially when they crawl your pages excessively. Recently, we encountered this issue with one of our country climate change portals built on Drupal 7. Here's how we tackled the problem and restored the site's performance. 🔍 The Investigation Begins When we noticed performance issues on our climate change p...