WordPress 6.6.2 and older? | WordPress.org

Hi there,

I am really sorry to hear about that. It sounds like you’re dealing with unwanted traffic or bots targeting the “/*” URL. Changing the permalinks to Plain is a good temporary solution, but it’s not ideal for long-term SEO.

To address this, you can try the following steps:

1. Block the URL using .htaccess: Add this code to your .htaccess file to block requests to the “/*” URL:

 RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^-$ - [F,L]

This will return a 403 Forbidden error for that specific URL.

2. Use a security plugin: A plugin like Wordfence or Sucuri can help block malicious bots and rate-limit requests.
3. Enable a firewall: Consider a web application firewall (WAF) like Cloudflare to filter out bad traffic.

Hopefully, one of these solutions will help reduce the bandwidth usage.

Thanks. I’ve added that code to the htaccess file and it appears to be working.

If you want to go back to your prefered permalinks, these two plugins might help: