[mythtv-users] getting forbidden message on MythTV.org website

[David Hampton]

On Mon, 2026-05-04 at 14:03 +1000, Paul Wilson via mythtv-users wrote:
>  
> I was browsing on the forum and now I'm getting the following page?
>  
> 403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. 
>  
> have I don't something wrong?

No, you didn't do anything wrong.  You probably triggered the rate
filtering on the website.  There should have been some "429 Too Many
Request" errors before the 403 error.  If it happens again just wait a
minute or two and retry.

I can try and tweak the website configuration to present more 429
errors, but the rate filtering has to stay.  Between all the search
company bot scanning, and all the AI company bot scanning, and all the
compromised PCs doing vulnerability scanning, there are very few actual
real user searches.  I was astonished when I discovered how many junk
traffic there is to the website.  When I first moved the website to its
new infrastructure it didn't have  any filtering, and the volume of
traffic to our website took down the entire OSUOSL MySQL cluster,
dragging down all of the ~150 different websites that they host. 
Filtering is their requirement for using the MySQL cluster.

David