Forum News & Discussion

[R6cowboy]

Oh my landta.

[Lowgear]

The past day or two I've noticed the board acting a bit funny speed wise so I checked the server monitor and the load is bouncing off of 100%. I logged into Cloudflare to check the traffic activity because that's normally what causes it, and it seems we're getting inundated with some bad traffic from the US which occasionally occurs so I had to re-enable that filter for the time being.

[MarkyDents]

Good news, it’s been verified…. I’m human !

[1911Colt]

Good news, it’s been verified…. I’m human !

Let's not jump to conclusions.

I don't know you well, so this is me hoping you take jokes well :

[Lowgear]

Here we are exactly one month later and the board started lagging badly again. Looked at the server monitor and yup, it's at 100% load. I logged into Cloudflare to try and figure out what was going on, and after much detective work it seemed like we were being inundated by Hong Kong. I blocked all traffic from China as a result, but it still didn't fix things. What the heck I thought, that must not be the problem then. After spending more time I realized that Cloudflare's traffic filter settings consider China and Hong Kong two separate entities. So I blocked Hong Kong specifically, and we're back in business. Only took over an hour to figure out, too.

The good news is upon trying to figure out the problem, I discovered some bot settings here on the board that needed to be changed. Also now AI bots are becoming a thing which need to be handled completely different from regular bots. I enabled a few settings in Cloudflare that should help prevent some of their harmful actions.

[radioactivity]

Maybe it's just me...

Has happened a couple times and then I can get on.


Chuck

[GoMachV]

Getting the same

[Dangeruss]

Yeah... I poked around and found if you right click and open the page in a new tab you'll have better success at getting pages to load.

[RogueIV]

Happening to me too. I think one of the anti bot tools might be overzealous

[Lowgear]

I noticed several hours ago that something wasn't right... again! I logged into Cloudflare and played around with some new settings one of which was rate limiting. I was going to post about it in case it caused anyone problems but got sidetracked. It looks like it did.

I just raised the limit so lets see if that helps. It's a matter of finding the balance between blocking the bad traffic, yet not blocking the good.


Things are REALLY bad as of late. For some reason we are getting relentlessly DDoS attacked from different countries with China being the worst. They've made a million and a half hits alone. I'm trying to filter an unprecedented 2.20 million total requests made in just the past 24 hours.

[RogueIV]

I noticed several hours ago that something wasn't right... again! I logged into Cloudflare and played around with some new settings one of which was rate limiting. I was going to post about it in case it caused anyone problems but got sidetracked. It looks like it did.

I just raised the limit so lets see if that helps. It's a matter of finding the balance between blocking the bad traffic, yet not blocking the good.


Things are REALLY bad as of late. For some reason we are getting relentlessly DDoS attacked from different countries with China being the worst. They've made a million and a half hits alone. I'm trying to filter an unprecedented 2.20 million total requests made in just the past 24 hours.

Probably AI farms scraping for data.

[Lowgear]

That's one of the problems as well but It's a combination of things. I can disallow AI bot scraping but am having a hard time making a decision as there's pro and cons to it. I was hoping that rate limiting all traffic would fix everything. The theory is it would stop the rapid fire hammering of the site without completely blocking the various causes which could be detrimental to do.

[Dangeruss]

Things are REALLY bad as of late. For some reason we are getting relentlessly DDoS attacked from different countries with China being the worst. They've made a million and a half hits alone. I'm trying to filter an unprecedented 2.20 million total requests made in just the past 24 hours.

Maybe all the people in China got laid off because of trade tariffs so they've got nothing better to do than surf the web.

[BattleTrak]

I got the rate limited error this morning too.. I kinda figured it was another attack from China you had to deal with.. everything ok now. Ultimately, what is the purpose of these attacks and bots and whatever…?

[Lowgear]

I got rate limited when I came on for the first time today. As such, I increased the threshold to be more lenient. If it's still not good enough, I'll disable it completely. Sorry for the inconvenience as I test what works. Thank goodness for Cloudflare which acts as a traffic filter among other things for us. If it wasn't for that, this place would be done for.

Bots or search engine spiders are sometimes of the rogue variety where they don't follow proper protocol or the rules set in place for them.

Now there's the newest AI kind that relentlessly scrape (steal) a sites content to provide answers when people use the various AI chats out there. It's the same thing where some run without restrictions, and don't care what they do to the originating source.

Last but not least there's Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks where botnets are purposely used to overwhelm a website or servers resources with malicious traffic in an attempt to bring it down.

We constantly deal with all 3 due to the popularity, longevity, and content of this place. Over the past month or so we've been getting hit at incredibly high levels.