Anti-Spam is great but needs to address bots and crawlers

Clear Talk Anti-Spam was all I needed in conjunction with Imunify 360 to keep servers stable and free of abuse.

This past year has had me fighting against all of these AI bots and scrapers that use hundreds and even thousands of different IP addresses to continually scrape every page of every website. They are frequently from the same network using the first two octets.

I’ve had to write plugins that can track and detect abusive IP addresses up the chain and eventually block their entire IP address block of the most abusive networks (frequently Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and AWS server traffic) just to keep my sites available to real visitors. These bots will otherwise eat up every available connection slot and grind a site to a halt.

It’d be a 5 star rating, and was a 5 star in my book, but this year it is only a 4 star because these abusive bots and scrapers need to be addressed in 2026.