How are 500 'guests' (AI & crawlers) browsing my forum when those permissions are turned off?

[tribedude]

I had a situation a few months ago where AI scrapers, predominantly Chinese, were scraping our forum so I removed guests or unregistered permissions to view or browse the forum. I essentially put it behind the log in screen. This worked for a while, but now they are back.
I see 500 'guests' browsing our forum, so they must have found a way to do this again.

What can I do to keep them out? How can they browse without permissions?

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