In the age of AI and Social Media, there are more bots than ever. I recently noticed we are giving up 70% of our server load to HEAD requests. This appears to be fueling a constant load on the database even when there is very little activity from members. If you are seeing a kind of pumping activity of load rise and fall, it is probably from this.
I have blocked HEAD requests to mitigate this activity because it is being done by dynamic IP sources without user agents and or ignoring robots.txt. However, this is not ideal as HEAD should be saving load from GET requests. Seems to me the IPB system could somehow mitigate this or is everything, even the headers, coming from the system DB?
IMO, IPB really needs to focus some tools on how to deal with bots and scraping. The AI boom is literally inciting others to machine-learn our community activity for who knows what uses. This is not only hurting our sever performance, it is abusing the community and members in ways we cannot forsee.