Sorry But Image Upload For This Forum Is A Nightmare

We've moved twice already, and I don't plan on it again. The database alone now exceeds 20GB in size. There are 450GB of just images.

We were on shared hosting with GoDaddy when we first launched, at 6.99/month. Outgrew that in 18 months.

We then moved to a server owned by one of the forum developers. It was so-so; he had a full-time job, so support was spotty. That was around $200/month. He passed away in 2021, and we almost completely lost everything. Rackspace wouldn't even acknowledge anyone but him; they wouldn't even talk to his wife. Our friend Rui stayed up all night babysitting the download of our database before they shut the server down, and he had to work the next day. It took about 9 hours. We we so close to not being here anymore. If it had taken a few more days for us to find out he passed, we wouldn't be here.

I then decided not to depend on anyone else anymore. We now have our own dedicated server at Liquidweb, $360/month. Terrific support, answers within 10 minutes. Of course, that doesn't include things like Cloudflare and Cleantalk to keep the douchenozzles away, domain registrations, email, etc.

This software has so many modifications now, I'll never give it up. I've learned how to do a lot of things myself. If we switched to one of the other common boards, I'd have to learn PHP from scratch and probably pay someone to do a lot of the mods again that are over my head.

Thats quite a story Bobby! I can imagine all the effort that goes into running this place.
By the way, out of curiosity, you pay for cloudflare? Thats why their stocks are up so much! I would have guessed the free plan was enough.

I'm curious to know why cloudflare so badly constricts network advertising. Does that mean the other 60% was being generated by false page views?

No, I think it's a combination of people seeing the challenge and leaving, and Cloudflare blocking legitimate visitors.

I respect what Bobby is doing. Free forums like this is becoming quite scarce. Some other forums that I used to frequent just disappeared - I can only imagine it's simply due to financial reasons. Easy to criticize but when one finds out what goes behind the scenes...

Thank for your dedication Bobby.

Simple question but which hardly has a simple answer --- it depends. Also "bots" is an umbrella term which includes from Google itself to actors inside botnets used by whoever hires them.

Being that this is a forum, these are the main options in my opinion:
Just crawlers/scrapers looking for content. Google is one of them but there are hundreds. They all ask for stuff and their effect gets compounded. The bigger the site (in terms of contents), the worse the effect.
Spammers try to automate credential abuse to guess user/pwd or automate registration of new users. These credentials are then used/sold to actual spamming entities which would create posts. These are especially painful as they target particualarly weak part of the system.
AI Agents have been quite annoying since last year in the way they crawl. They are especially bad for old tech (such as this site) and often loop and create issues.
Revenge by other forums/people.. for whatever reason.. any tech-savvy and agry person can try to "hurt" for few bucks or even by himself other sites.
Forums might sometime be victim of larger governmental campaigns or hactivism groups. Example: this forum mostly deals with USA coins.. one may say they want to create issues to whatever is USA related.. and suddenly this forum is in the crossair.
There's of course entities looking for vulnerabilities to then hack the server itself but they don't usually generate much traffic.