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