How to deal with sudden high “Other traffic” in site analytics?

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Hi everyone,

I recently noticed a huge spike in “Other traffic” on my forum’s community health page (Discourse admin dashboard → Reports → Community health).

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Here are the details:

•	Period: Around early August 2025

•	Daily traffic: jumped to 100k+ “Other traffic” per day

•	Example: On Aug 16, 2025

•	Logged-in pageviews: 12,531

•	Anonymous pageviews: 2,753

•	Known crawlers: 6,865

•	Other traffic: 102,054 (majority of my total 124k)

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This “Other traffic” seems abnormal and is much higher than real user activity. Signups are stable, so it doesn’t look like genuine growth.

My questions are:

1\. What does “Other traffic” usually mean in Discourse?

2\. Could this be bots, spam, or misconfigured reverse proxy/CDN?

3\. How can I reduce or filter this traffic? (e.g. Nginx, firewall, Discourse settings)

4\. Is it safe to just ignore, or will it affect performance/cost?

Any suggestions or best practices to properly handle this kind of third-party/bot traffic would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance!