Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you define a user, and how do you define online? If the forum considers unique cookies to be a user and creates a new cookie for any new cookie-less request, and if it considers a user to be online for 1 hour after their last request, then actually this may be one scraper making ~6 requests per second. That may be a pain in its own way, but it's far from 23k online bots.
That's still 518.400 requests per day . For static content. And it's a niche forum, so it's not exactly going to have millions of pages. Either there are indeed hundreds or thousands of AI bots DDoSing the entire internet, or a couple of bots are needlessly hammering it over and over and over again. I'm not sure which option is worse.
Imagine if all this scraping was going into a search engine with a massive index, or a bunch of smaller search engines that a meta-search engine could be made for. This’d be a lot more cool in that case