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I've noticed in the last few days that the forum intermittently slows to a crawl when I click on things. Just wanted to check whether anyone else was getting this, and whether @SkullTraill had noticed anything?
OK. New manual anti-bot cloudflare rules are implemented. Please let me know if you still face slowdowns from now on. If this doesn't fix the issue, then the only remaining solution will be to upgrade the server which... I'll have to see about the cost (it's a lot). The new ruleset should also not affect PayPal payment notifications so I'm really hoping this finally fixes the issue.
Also let me know if you're having any issues/delays with payments/account upgrades.
@Robert Ramsay I'll leave it on for the next few days, please let me know if you experience any slowdowns during this time (to narrow down the cause) - I don't like keeping this setting on so if this fixes it I'll see about upgrading the cloudflare plan and implementing targeted rules.
@Robert Ramsay I'll leave it on for the next few days, please let me know if you experience any slowdowns during this time (to narrow down the cause) - I don't like keeping this setting on so if this fixes it I'll see about upgrading the cloudflare plan and implementing targeted rules.
I got a brief screen of "checking you are a hooman" before taking me to the forum. Don't know what other people's experiences are, but I could certainly put up with that if it keeps the bugs away
@Robert Ramsay I'll leave it on for the next few days, please let me know if you experience any slowdowns during this time (to narrow down the cause) - I don't like keeping this setting on so if this fixes it I'll see about upgrading the cloudflare plan and implementing targeted rules.
I got the Cloudflare check and it isn't problematic. Well, since it is now 3:08 P.M. in my country, the forum works fine. I will check back at 7:30 P.M. and see if it behaves way too slow like it used to do. If, and hopefully won't behave slow, it means that the bots / ai crawlers can go straight where they came from
@Robert Ramsay I'll leave it on for the next few days, please let me know if you experience any slowdowns during this time (to narrow down the cause) - I don't like keeping this setting on so if this fixes it I'll see about upgrading the cloudflare plan and implementing targeted rules.
Well, I checked at 7:30 P.M. (as per my country time) and it didn't slow down. Bravo @SkullTraill , now the AI crawlers will certainly know their place: the recycle bin
If the bots are the problem, then some trap might help. Back in the day when I was having a blog, we had a lot of problems with bots spamming our comments. We all solved it by adding to our webs link to antispamer web, which was a trap where the bots got stuck. Doesn't probably work anymore, but it was damn effective. Surely there is some more modern alternative today.
I've had to turn off the bot fight mode because it was blocking PayPal API notifications for new benefactor upgrades. However, since I know broadly speaking what works now, I'll work on a more targeted Cloudflare ruleset to curb the bots/scrapers. I'll also try and see if upgrading the server itself would be worth it.
I hadn't logged any times the slowdowns happened for me, but I did notice there were thousands of guests when it did happen (4000-5000+.) We had issues like this on the SA forum multiple times, especially before the end, and I thought they were caused by bots/crawlers as well, but didn't have admin access to look into doing something about it. I don't think the normal filters are reliable anymore with these AI bots, but don't know enough to help other than offer my opinion, I think you've found the cause.
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Slowdown starting 9am PST, Total: 5,777 (members: 26, guests: 5,751)
Continuing through 9:20am PST, Total: 6,074 (members: 19, guests: 6,055)
Still ongoing as I post this.
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Speed back to normal 9:34am PST, Total: 5,881 (members: 23, guests: 5,858)
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Return to notmal was brief, slowdown ongoing as of 9:58am PST, Total: 6,580 (members: 20, guests: 6,560)
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Now speed seems normal again, but not expecting it to stay that way. Total: 7,087 (members: 22, guests: 7,065)
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Speed seemed to remain normal whenever I came back since last post, and guest counts seemed to drop off pretty quickly down to around 3000-4000
Friday night and Saturday all day 10/9 - 10/10/26 Severe molasses effect! Some functions measured in good chunks of a minute. SLOW!
4K++ guests / 13 users logged in!
Friday night and Saturday all day 10/9 - 10/10/26 Severe molasses effect! Some functions measured in good chunks of a minute. SLOW!
4K++ guests / 13 users logged in!
Not sure if this has been reported before, but last night I noticed something that I found puzzling. Relatively often (maybe one day out of four) the forum shows as unresponsive to me. Not a browser or network connection error; after a minute trying to connect, I will receive an error from the forum backend itself, the "resource cannot be reached" kind of error. This will keep happening for a while, sometimes a few hours, and then become perfectly responsive again. I usually shrugged and moved on.
Last night, however, I got this issue and I thought about trying a VPN. I fired up the client, connected through some other European country, and boom - forum was immediately accessible again. It's funny because usually it may happen the other way, VPN connections flagged as suspicious or bot activity, and regular non-proxied IPs working well. Maybe your cloudflare flags connections by geographical origin sometimes?
It seems to me to be at least partly geographical and very strange, some functions are affected more than others, I've see button lags close to 30 seconds. Some tabs will never stop trying to load, other strange stuff, interesting but gets old very fast.
Not sure if this has been reported before, but last night I noticed something that I found puzzling. Relatively often (maybe one day out of four) the forum shows as unresponsive to me. Not a browser or network connection error; after a minute trying to connect, I will receive an error from the forum backend itself, the "resource cannot be reached" kind of error. This will keep happening for a while, sometimes a few hours, and then become perfectly responsive again. I usually shrugged and moved on.
Last night, however, I got this issue and I thought about trying a VPN. I fired up the client, connected through some other European country, and boom - forum was immediately accessible again. It's funny because usually it may happen the other way, VPN connections flagged as suspicious or bot activity, and regular non-proxied IPs working well. Maybe your cloudflare flags connections by geographical origin sometimes?
It seems to me to be at least partly geographical and very strange, some functions are affected more than others, I've see button lags close to 30 seconds. Some tabs will never stop trying to load, other strange stuff, interesting but gets old very fast.
Cloudflare is on barebones default settings with regards to anything that can affect this. In fact the only time geolocation is factored in anything to do with WF (by my hand) is registration for weeding out spam registrations.
The resource not found type errors are due to the CPU maxing out during peak usage (combination of number of visitors + what they are querying).
Using a VPN or otherwise resetting your connection might lead to you making a solid connection/skipping the queue and therefore being able to use use WF smoothly while that connection is running but it’s actually got nothing to do with the VPN itself or the location.
It’s simply an issue with resource allocation and queueing, and for that, no one has priority, not even me.
I still haven’t got around to implementing that fix I mentioned earlier, once I do it should significantly cut down on resource usage, and if there are still issues I’ll look into a way to deprioritize guests over members.
OK. New manual anti-bot cloudflare rules are implemented. Please let me know if you still face slowdowns from now on. If this doesn't fix the issue, then the only remaining solution will be to upgrade the server which... I'll have to see about the cost (it's a lot). The new ruleset should also not affect PayPal payment notifications so I'm really hoping this finally fixes the issue.
Also let me know if you're having any issues/delays with payments/account upgrades.
16k requests challenged, only 21.5% passed the challenge. At first it was around 8%, seems to be climbing as legit users meet the challenge but damn that's a lot of bot traffic being blocked.
. Too bad though that the people are those representative of the Dead Internet Theory 
