I’ve turned off the majority of the IP address filtering and moved most forums to private. Hopefully this works to keep the site up!
Does “private” mean only those who have subscribed to Textkit can see the forums?
Mostly. You can still see the Open Board, etc., at the top without having logged in
Then I’d suggest adding a new subforum called Annoucements at the top under Textkit Community and put a sticky post there that explains (1) what subforums you’ll see if you register as a Textkit member and (2) why these subforums are hidden from public view (because of AI DDoS etc). That way anyone who stumbles across Textkit (like I did awhile back) will have an idea what it’s all about and whether they might want to join.
I’ve added an announcement plugin with a special announcement that will only appear for Guest users.
Looks good 
Even with the cutover to private forums, search has been down the last couple of days due to load. So I wrote new phpbb code last night and was able to make the following determinations:
Current traffic averages 100,000 bot hits (from 80K unique IP addresses) for every 5,000 anonymous web users, for every 20-30 logged in users.
This morning, using the information from my new logs, I did a more “targeted” IP block against the 1500 most active /16 blocks for bot traffic, or 2.5% of the entire internet. Search has been fine and CPU load emails have stopping coming in. Assuming this continues to look good, I can hopefully look into making Textkit public again.
Not sure if this is related, but has this done something to the RSS feed. I haven’t had anything appear in my feed reader (NetNewsWire 6.1.9 on MacOS 15.2) since 18 January, though there have manifestly been posts since then. I’d be most grateful if the feed could be turned back on (if it’s been turned off). I’m sure I’m not the only one who relies on it for notifications of new posts