Website performance/reliability issues

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Due to an influx of high-resource requests against the website, the website keeps going down. I've temporarily disabled the forums (again) to keep the main website alive... Some thoughts/tasks on this topic...

* [x] Slow or prevent the bots constantly crawling our PHP pages, causing a lot of database requests
* [ ] Implement a more performant way to handle these requests
* [x] Investigate some storms that have occurred by non-bots (possible DDoS)
* [x] Review LSP code/database efficiency for long-running processes
* [ ] Review phpBB plugins for helping with long-running processes

HIstorically, we've allowed all websites to crawl our page as it helps people get answers they need quickly however the bots have gotten out of control... Here's a 12-hour snapshot of our nginx access logs....

Any additional help is greatly appreciated. This is a volunteer-lead website and resources are limited.

```bash
sudo cat /var/log/nginx/access.log |grep bingbot |wc -l
```

```
bot hits
-----------------
bingbot 10717
PetalBot 7206
Amazonbot 5517
Googlebot 5085
SemrushBot 4670
MJ12bot 4114
AwarioBot 3899
UptimeRobot 3550
ChatGPT 1614
AhrefsBot 952
YandexBot 497
PerplexityBot 181
DuckDuckBot 24
DiscordBot 21
trendictionbot 18
```

Start by reviewing /var/log/nginx/access.log and running the provided bingbot count command to characterize request volume. Then investigate the two unchecked tasks: a more performant request-handling approach and phpBB plugins for long-running processes. Done means the website remains available under high-resource traffic and both areas have a documented resolution.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.