Interesting data here. This is a 1-week chart.
A: bots were hammering MVS + I didn't have proper defenses + I was neck deep in redoing defenses. The beginning of several days of Rambo mode.
B: some of my new defense tricks were working. At this point I'd redone a lot of Cloudflare settings including creating and using a CF tunnel to make the server's naked IP address unreachable (must use DNS/www.matthewsvolvosite.com), edge caching of images. New db table indexes, new php configuration, new nginx configuration, new phpBB settings including phpBB cache in memory instead of disk, 86'ed heavy site XML feeds, installed Varnish caching for guests.
C: tuned Varnish to handle every guest page request and serve 403 Forbidden HTTP responses to many different types of requests for not-logged-in users. Ah ha. Breakthrough here.
D: data harvesting bot capitulation. I didn't do anything new here. They gave up.
