Welp, I found out what was causing those server issues - it wasn’t the bots (although we do have a lot of bots crawling the site today).

It was happening because someone (I won’t say who) uploaded an animated GIF image, but with a JPG extension, and our new mobile image scaling function was getting very confused. It kept trying to scale the image over and over, causing the server load to skyrocket.

Fixed now.