Peregrine Lake – A Weekly Webcomic Written by Trae Dorn and Drawn by Ethan Flanagan

One of the most frustrating things over the last few months has been dealing with my website getting constantly hit with requests from malicious bots repeatedly hammering and scraping my website. Back at the beginning of August I described it as a DDOS attack — where bots were hammering the old TRHOnline Forums. It took down the Perl interpreter on the server, was burning through my bandwidth, and effectively crashed my whole website.

I ended up band-aiding some stuff (and taking the forum offline), but in September I effectively had to recode my whole website in PHP to keep the thing online.

The bots, which ignore the robots.txt file on my server (or are deliberately targeting things listed on it), have been largely running from cloud service providers. They disguise their useragents as normal people, but it’s easy to backtrack their IPs (and they don’t request a website the same way a human end-user does). I stopped it for a while by blocking any requests from Google’s cloud services back in September, but they restarted this month running off of Alibaba and Tencent’s.

It’s like playing wack-a-mole.

Like I don’t know if this is for illicit AI scraping or if it’s an attempt to find an exploit in old PHPBB code (they keep trying to get to the version of the forum I took down — which now redirects them to a Rick Roll). I mean, maybe I really am the victim of a DDOS attack, though I find that highly unlikely.

It’s mostly just annoying, because there are a million things I’d rather be doing than this like talking about my upcoming novel or the great episode of BS-Free Witchcraft coming out Saturday with Thumper Forge. But no, instead I’m searching out IP blocks I can ban from my site to keep it running, hoping I don’t accidentally kick some legitimate visitors.

It’s just annoying and I hate it.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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