OS2 World Community Forum
Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: Martin Iturbide on November 01, 2025, 03:56:34 am
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Hello
I'm trying some available tools to try to slow down the bots spamming the site.
Please let me know any strange behavior that you may find on the site.
Regards
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Joulian installed on the hostap/wpa_supplicant site something called Anubis. No clue what it is or does though. But he said traffic load goes down by more than 99% cause all of these bots are now blocked before they load the server.
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anubis is a proxy that forces a web browser to do a tiny bit of "work" a scripted bot would generally be incapable of. if they succeed then the connection is passed along to the real web server.
it would be wise to confirm that the web browsers we do have on os/2 are capable of passing the checks ;)
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Well I went to their website, https://anubis.techaro.lol/ (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) and it claimed to be testing the soul of my browser and I seemed to have passed as after a second or two the page loaded. This is with No-Script so no JavaScript was run.
Edit: This is SeaMonkey. Turning JS on (only one domain) did make the site work better and it works fine on our browsers, at least at a quick look.
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That's the site I'm talking about https://w1.fi/ (most probably).
Sorry I wrote Jouni Malinen's name wrong above. He wrote about spam bots and Anubis in the news group. As I don't have any knowledge about bots and protection I can't say anything about different approaches or software.
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Hello
Thanks for the feedback.
Anubis looks interesting, and I tried out the Anubis site on ArcaOS's Firefox, Dooble and Otter.
All three browsers access the "checking you are not a bot page" and access the site fine. Firefox has an exception that didn't support the graphics, but went also to the page. I think it will work for our browsers.
But, a few days ago I had installed BadBot Protection for Joomla, (which also seems to work on our browsers) and I think it is similar, it also shows sometimes a "checking you are not a bot page" on OS2World and for the moment I haven't have issues. But let's see what happens.
Regards
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The images don't display in FF/SM due to being webp which our browsers are too old to support.
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I noticed when the problem happens, the Latest Forum posts is the last to come up. I wonder if the downloads are using most of your bandwidth. There are a couple of themes showing thousands of downloads while others show over 500 downloads. When I tried a download test during one of the problem times, it was so slow, one would think I was using an old modem.
Don’t get me wrong. I like posting the themes here because people have some idea what they are downloading due to the pictures showing the themes.
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Sounds like bots are downloading the themes, can't imagine enough users for that many downloads
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I was thinking the same thing.
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Hi Martin
If BadBot Protection displays the "Checking..." page here it will not load os2world until javascript is enabled.
It also seems to affect other websites ie if I load https://theartofsound.net/forum/ after getting the "Checking..." message on os2world a "Javascript Required" page is displayed instead of loading the website. If os2world does not show the "Checking..." message there is no "Javascript Required" message displayed when loading theartofsound website.
Regards
Pete
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Hello Pete
We changed the spambot protection technique. For the moment it is working, but let's see what happens. I think you should now not see the "Checking..." page at OS2World, right?
Regards
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I just noticed that anubis seems to be preventing me from accessing edm2 with firefox and seamonkdy. Did I miss a setting somewhere? If not, can the same fixes that are used for os2world be applied to edm2?
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Hello Steven
The OS2World server implemented a new firewall and some changes on a apache-mod for blocking the bots.
EDM/2 is hosted by Netlabs. Adrian will have to check on that. On my side EDM2 is working with the Dooble browser, I don't know if you want to give it a try. "yum install dooble".
Regards
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Both dooble5 and dooble6 work here too, but they are slower than firefox and still less stable. Thanks.
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Yes Anubis blocks my SM on OS/2 too. But I've Prefbar installed and so it's easy to switch UA. When I select Lynx 'Lynx/2.8.3rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14FM' edm2 works.
edm2 works too with SM from Debian. UA 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 SeaMonkey/2.53.23'
Too bad that we have to cheat our real UA to access OS/2 related sites ;-).
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Not unexpectedly, the Lynx UA works for firefox too. Thanks.
Turns out changing "Mozilla" to "OS2zilla" in the default OS/2 UA works too. So we don't have to give up on our OS/2 oriented UAs.