The ultimate bad bot blocker (https://github.com/mitchellkrogza/nginx-ultimate-bad-bot-blocker) does the heavy lifting for me, it updates multiple times per day to add and remove IP addreses and bot referers. It does need some monitoring though, some of the rules wildcard a bit hard and will catch mastadon servers with unusual names for example.

Even better, I found a company that pays me in money while having a free beer fridge in the office :D (at least, up until before I basically started wfh full time during the pandemic)

Went to university to study Bioinformatics. There I discovered I don’t really like biology, but I did really like getting paid beer to fix other student’s computers. Especially when they were desperate around submission deadlines cos they hadn’t backed up their work for weeks/months before their computer went kaput.

I’ve been a sysadmin now for 13 years since graduating.