On server side:

Apart from the ideas with reverse proxies dealing with anonymous clients... (Which would take longer to implement).

We could block all anonymous access on the servers every other hour as "maintenance downtime" till the problem is fixed. ¹

As an extended idea

In these windows individual monks could test private proxies and probably share the settings.

Personally I have left a trove of content here over the years. I kind of need a backup.

Saying so I realize I could try to poll the way back machine. Hmm 🤔

Update

We could block all anonymous access on the servers every other hour as "maintenance downtime" till the problem is fixed.

Nothing against anonymity, but if blocking anonymous access will work, then that should be done immediately.
(Just do it as a permanent arrangement ... if that's what it takes.)

Cheers,
Rob

While I'm certain that the suggestions here are certainly well-meant, I think they are unlikely to have any impact. Many of the Anonymous requests are already served from static pages. Serving an "access denied" page instead of the static page will have very little impact.

I think the next step will be to separate the machine where logged-in users access the site from the machine where the crawlers roam. But that requires some setup and thinking, and I won't do that until I have reserved enough time to implement this and also deal with the fallout.

One downside of having the site accessible at all is that people have again a venue to complain about the site responsiveness.

> (Just do it as a permanent arrangement ... if that's what it takes.)

I don't think becoming invisible is a viable option.

It's already the case that most search engines except google don't index us anymore.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
see Wikisyntax for the Monastery}