@utzer @utzer ok so you could block those user agents I have something like
which has cut down a lot of bad traffic from getting 200, and getting hit with a 410 when it knocks on my door, I would start there, because blocking ips is fun and easy, but if they are being spoofed, they will just spoof more, and worse when they get recycled to actual valid users then you lose traffic, I have found the agent blocking is more effective, they are not willing to rewrite every script to adjust for that so for now it seems to be the fastest block, and if it is getting that hard, run it through cloudflare on the free side proxied for a while anyways to help slowdown and divert the bad traffic, it will keep your server happier, I know not everyone is a fan of that, but somtimes you have to change the route to stay on the road
# Fake browser detection
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Chrome/[0-9]{3}|Chrome/1[3-9][0-9]|Chrome/150|Firefox/1[3-9][0-9]|Safari/60[0-9]|Version/17) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE} ^$
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} "GET\shttp" [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L] and then # 1. BLOCK BAD BROWSER NAMES / BOT FRAMEWORKS
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (CCBot|SearchEngineBot|Pandalytics|UCBrowser|ZoneProjectBot|Embarcadero\sURI\sClient|Xenu\sLink\sSleuth|siteradar|SignalsBot|fun-cert-watch|SERankingBacklinksBot|Pinterestbot|CMS-Checker|HeadlessChrome|Puppeteer|SeznamBot|Sogou|8LEGS|HTTrack|cherrypicker|AhrefsBot|BLEXBot|DotBot|MJ12bot|PetalBot|SemrushBot|BuiltWith|Viewer/99|Python|aiohttp|curl|Wget|libwww|Go-http-client|GeedoShopProductFinder|DuckDuckBot|node|IMJ-CompanyPage-Scraper|baidu|RootEvidence|NetAPI\sv1|Scrapy|Bingbot|SummalyBot|got|HUNT-Bot|CibraxScanner|SalesOS-CompanyVerifier|RecordedFuture|SurdotlyBot|panscient\.com|Xiaomi|Android.*Firefox|GPTBot|ClaudeBot|BardBot|LLMScraper|Firecrawl|Crawl4AI|ia_archiver|archive\.org_bot|Google|wp2shell|okhttp|Cortex-Xpanse|Mozilla\.5\.0\.compatible;\.MSIE\.10\.0;\.Windows\.NT\.6\.1;\.Trident/6\.0|facebookexternalhit|facebookexternalua|Version\.13\.0\.3\.Mobile\.15E148\.Safari\.604\.1|iPhone.*Version/13\.0\.3|Safari/604\.1|cms-scanner|OAI-SearchBot|ChatGPT-User|PerplexityBot|Perplexity-User|Amazonbot|Applebot-Extended|Meta-ExternalAgent|Meta-ExternalFetcher|cohere-ai|DeepSeek|Bytespider|Diffbot|Omgilibot|Omgili|Google-Extended|Google-CloudVertex|MistralAI-User|OAI-AdsBot|YouBot|anthropic-ai|NosibleBot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} "^[A-Z]{3,9}\s+https?://" [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [G,L]
# 2. BLOCK SPAM WEBSITES (REFERRERS)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (baidu\.com|bsky\.(net|com|app)|facebook\.com|meta\.com|threads\.(com|net)|instagram\.com|google\.com|googleusercontent\.com|youtube\.com|x\.com|t\.co|twitter\.com|x\.ai|bing\.com|yahoo\.com|yandex\.com|duckduckgo\.com|microsoft\.com|amazon\.com|brave\.com|semalt\.com|buttons-for-website\.com|darodar\.com|blackhatworth\.com|ilovevitaly\.com|priceg\.com|ranksonic\.com) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [G,L]
###############################################
# SAFE BOT & SCRAPER KILLER (FRIENDICA-COMPATIBLE)
###############################################
# Kill obvious scanners by User-Agent
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (nmap|nikto|acunetix|sqlmap|fimap|nessus|openvas|arachni|wpscan|dirbuster|fuzzer) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L]
# Kill requests with directory traversal attempts
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\.\./|\.\.\\|%2e%2e|%5c) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L]
# Kill malformed absolute URLs
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} "^[A-Z]{3,9}\s+https?://" [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L]
# Kill empty User-Agent ONLY if NOT federation
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [G,L] which has cut down a lot of bad traffic from getting 200, and getting hit with a 410 when it knocks on my door, I would start there, because blocking ips is fun and easy, but if they are being spoofed, they will just spoof more, and worse when they get recycled to actual valid users then you lose traffic, I have found the agent blocking is more effective, they are not willing to rewrite every script to adjust for that so for now it seems to be the fastest block, and if it is getting that hard, run it through cloudflare on the free side proxied for a while anyways to help slowdown and divert the bad traffic, it will keep your server happier, I know not everyone is a fan of that, but somtimes you have to change the route to stay on the road