[3.3.x] Support Forum • Any way to avoid Guest users entirely?

Recently my forum suffers from a massive amount of (guest) sessions being created (by unidentified bots presumably?)

Naturally this then fills up the session table (in my case to around 150.000 records...) and then slows down the forum accordingly...

I purged them all today (several times in fact) and it then takes about a minute (!) and 20.000+ guest sessions are right back there again...

I removed any kind of access for the Guest group, so all a guest would see is a forum that has no forums, but the sessions still get created nonetheless of course...

I have learned I cannot delete the Anonymous user, which is of course the user id in all those thousands of guest sessions, but I was looking for a way to remove the ability for anyone to create a forum session when not being logged in and until now I could not really find one?

Have also reduced the session time from 3600 to 60 seconds in the Load Settings, but seems to not make any real difference (?)

Long story short - I am looking for a way to prevent access to the board for anyone who does not have proper login credentials.

Any ideas greatly appreciated...

Statistics: Posted by trlenet — Fri Mar 14, 2025 11:20 pm

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