Indeed, I have to whitelist the server itself so it is not blocked by cloudflare to get its own pic

edit: it should work now

When I am trying to upload pictures from a remote address, I am getting errors. More specifically, I am trying to merge pages and when I copy the image address and enter that, it is

Warning: file_get_contents(https://imcdb.org/i002123302.jpg?u=1786814326): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden in /var/www/imcdb/upload-utils.php on line 228

I'm can save the pic to my computer and then upload it. That works.

As the bad bots tend to change randomly their identifier (outside the list I made before), I enabled captcha for everyone except known bots, that should help with the bots not detected as bots. In the last hour it seems there were lots of issues, I suppose too much traffic, I'll analyze the logs later.
For real humans that captcha should not be an issue, just a checkbox once a day added by Cloudflare.

I'm guessing that I don't need to point out the obvious that the site went down about 15 minutes ago. It wouldn't even allow me to start the bot-block, before it timed out.

Strange. Now that the bad bots seem more or less filtered, I wonder what caused this. We'll see how it evolves in the next days.
At least it seems to globally work better.

That was the same exact time last night

error 500 , 8:50 PM , Baube's time zone

These match the peaks in the charts I see in the Cloudflare dashboards.
It seems that there is a peak of visits of these bots every few hours (even if they are there permanently), but I don't know if Cloudflare can see these are a real attack (maybe it will just see that as a peak of visitors), we'll see. In the worse case, I can enable something to force visitors to pass a captcha.
I'll enable the filtering later today.

Getting 500 Internal Error at 8:50pm EDT

500 internal server error as of right now.

Documenting.