[John]

That day the peak was somewhere around 75,000. 25,000 of the "online users"/bots I was able to redirect away from GreekChat, so only 50,000 of those connections hit the forum and were counted.

It was also on different web server hardware. The current server is much less powerful and I don't expect it would be able to handle that much.

So as to "why?"...

I'm fairly certain that all the bot floods we get on GC these days are AI related. Not all the bots are on GC for AI, many are spam bots and others are search engine bots (which are fine). But the massive floods of bots I believe are due to AI development.

AI needs lots of data, as much as possible. All the different major players in AI are basically in a worldwide race with enormous sums of money invested to help them win that race. AI developers scrape data and use that data to train their AI systems.

On GreekChat they are very likely scraping the forum conversations and using them to train their AI on how to have similar conversations. Also to help train their AI chatbots to be able to answer questions similar to those that have been answered here over the years.

One of the unfortunate impacts of the AI race is that their scraper bots flood GC and cause so many problems for GC in the process. They are a major headache for sure.