Bot Storm Radar scores WordPress traffic as a crowd to catch distributed bot swarms

Bot Storm Radar is a WordPress plugin that evaluates a site's traffic collectively rather than judging each visitor separately, so swarms of addresses making single requests can be detected. Each minute it measures distinct addresses, single-request visitors, browser-like asset loading, and user-agent diversity, combining these into a storm score from 0 to 100 against a seven-day baseline. The plugin can block scanner probes and temporarily ban persistent offenders, starting in an observe-only mode that logs would-be bans before enforcement. On the GitHub build, an early-loading gate can refuse probes before WordPress loads, while the wordpress.org build applies the same rules later and at higher cost. Verified search engine bots and administrators are exempt from bans.