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Site crashing due to fileers being attacked by bots

This topic has 6 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 2 months ago ago by ziga32

ziga32

Participant

September 27, 2025 at 11:46

Hello, every few days/weeks, my site crashes because many bots are indexing it and site reaches my otherwise very good and expensive hosting limits. For example, today there were approximately 61,860 requests made to the website.

website is karaonline.si

All these calls are directed at various filter combinations in the online store (e.g., filter_brand, filter_color), suggesting automated bot or scraper activity. Such requests do not represent genuine visitors but cause unnecessary server resource strain, as each call reprocesses the database and generates a dynamic page.

The most resource-intensive examples include:
/women/ankle-boots/?filter_brand=imac&filter_color=…
/women/ankle-boots/?filter_brand=guess,tamaris
/men/?filter_brand=tbs&filter_color=white

I blocked the ip this time, but tomorrow there will be another ip.

I’m using cloudflare and have this page rule set up.
https://share.cleanshot.com/3KGnw6jz
But does not seem to help.

I also had this security rule
https://share.cleanshot.com/FlK5XB41
but I disabled it, because filters do not work if enabled.

any suggestions what I need to do to get rid of bots targeting filters?

#456025 Copied

5 Answers

Jack Richardson

Support staff

September 28, 2025 at 15:49

Dear @ziga32,

We understand your concern regarding the high number of hits on your website. After reviewing the situation and based on the information shared, we would like to clarify that a significant portion of the traffic appears to be generated by automated bots.

These bots are designed to crawl websites and often bypass standard restrictions such as robots.txt or inline blocking methods. Their primary goal is to extract as much information as possible from your website, and they often simulate real user behavior, which makes them difficult to detect through basic analytics.

As AI technologies continue to evolve, these bots have become more aggressive in their crawling behavior. This results in a high number of requests to your server, which in turn leads to increased CPU and memory usage. This is likely the reason you’re observing high resource consumption despite having a relatively low number of actual users.

To mitigate this, we recommend implementing advanced bot protection measures such as server-level firewalls, rate limiting, or using services like Cloudflare to help filter out unwanted traffic. Please, ask your hosting provider for more details as it is more server-side implementation case.

Please let us know if you need assistance with any of these steps. We’re here to help.

Best regards,
8Theme’s Team

#456072 Copied

ziga32

Participant

September 29, 2025 at 10:10

I know these are automated bots, problem is they are targeting our sidebar filters. I already use cloudflare and problem seemedt to be gone when I had this enabled
https://share.cleanshot.com/FlK5XB41

But when this is enabled filters don’t work (they don’t filter). Is there any other solution for this?

#456145 Copied

Jack Richardson

Support staff

September 29, 2025 at 11:56

Hello @ziga32,

Thank you for providing the details of your custom rules to restrict filtering actions from bots. After our analysis, we found a recent article with updated settings in the Cloudflare documentation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurations/block-ai-bots/. We recommend that you try enabling this feature and then verify the results.

At this time, we do not have a ready-made solution available. However, we will be glad to share one with you if we discover a working option. We would also appreciate it if you could share with us any effective solution you may find during your own testing.

Best regards,
8Theme Team

#456153 Copied

ziga32

Participant

September 30, 2025 at 14:32

I already have this enabled….

#456270 Copied

ziga32

Participant

September 30, 2025 at 14:32

Thanks for the support! My topic “site crashing due to fileers being attacked by bots” has been successfully resolved.

#456271 Copied
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Site crashing due to fileers being attacked by bots

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