@jibberjab bots, bots everywhere :S they are always a problem, and they are also at the top of the priorities in the b2evo development team, but, sometimes, there is not too much else to do.

As I see it, this "blackhole" script uses the same technique that http://plugins.b2evolution.net/bottrap_x does. You just posted that bottrap wasn't being useful catching bad bots, but I guess that blackhole woudln't be effective either. So maybe it doesn't worth the effort.

I don't know if you made a quick search in the forums, these links could be useful:

http://forums.b2evolution.net/slammed-by-spambots-and-or-zombies
http://forums.b2evolution.net/anti-bot-ban-ip

This page also contains related information: http://b2evolution.net/man/recognizing-a-crawler-attack

Yes I searched on a lot of threads dealing with bots and blockers.. I wrote that bottrap X doesn't work because it simply doesn't seem like it's working.. at all.. It doesn't seem to function properly under 5.0.8 or 5.0.9 and I can't tell if it's doing anything. It's not that it hasn't slowed down the bot hits.. It's been running for a week and hasn't caught a single one, but I can see in the stats and the server load that the bots are endlessly hitting the site.

The blackhole script basically allows bots to travel into a hidden directory and then blacklists them.. I don't know if that's different from how bottrap X works because I don't see bottrap X working at all. However, many sites are using similar blackhole scripts and they apparently work, but I just need help getting that include to work without causing the blog to go completely blank. At least if I could get it running properly I could tell if it works and how well it works in comparison to bottrap X which just doesn't seem to be doing anything.

jj.