Keeping AI crawlers off my Forgejo server

NOTE This post will mention Cloudflare. People have a lot of strong opinions about the company’s effective monopoly, myself included, but it was the fastest way for me to solve my immediate problem. I’m also employed at Cloudflare, and get a free Enterprise account from them, but I believe nothing I have set up here requires one. If someone tries this out and runs into any free-tier limitations, please let me know and I will make a correction. Beginning 2026-06-18 I was starting to see a lot of slowness in my Forgejo instance, which I hoped would eventually subside, so I chose to just watch the load dashboards and wait. The crawlers obviously did not relent, so I started earnestly mitigating it on 2026-06-25 by enabling fail2ban which unfortunately did not do much to help the situation. I had to take a hammer to the problem and put in a Cloudflare security rule banning the countries of China and Vietnam where most of the requests were originating. The rule also carried a specific ban…