Anyone having trouble with initial access to the forum?

Same here, I always remain logged in but after been away from the computer for an hour, getting the first response for “unread” is > 6 seconds.
After that it is as quick as it should be.

Wim

And just now prevented from replying to a PM by being suspected of being a robot and having to answer silly questions! The reply I had laboriously typed no longer existed, and I had to log out and back in before I could do anything else. . .

While login seems better the past week, yesterday I saw a delay logging in…footer said over 150 “guests” online. But overall I would say things are better than when this fiasco started :wink:

I don’t think that’s new. It’s happened to me a time or two. I don’t know what causes it though but fortunately it seems rare enough that I don’t think it’s a major issue.

OK. But it’s new to me!

I wasn’t having any problems up until a few days ago. Now it take 5-10 seconds for the forum to come up on first access.

Had a ~8 second wait for the first time. Have logged into this thread once per day without delays up to now.

Yes: ~10 sec to find the site, 20+ to log in, ~10 sec to show unread posts.

EDIT: and over 5 seconds to post this reply!

I’m still not convinced that the Chinese traffic isn’t causing problems. The firewalls have blocked over 250,000 hits from China in the last 24 hours. Having said that the forum seems pretty responsive to me most of the time. When it’s sluggish I find that other sites are sluggish to which suggests it’s my connection rather than the forum.

Edit: Reply posted in less than a second

Not the case here, the Forum has just been bad all day on Edge with no sluggishness on other sites. Logged out and tried Chrome: just as bad.

Edit: Back on Edge now and it’s getting worse. Just spent over 5 secs to read my messages and over 5 secs to send a reply.

Edit2: and 7 secs to post the last edit.

For what it’s worth.

Yesterday was the slowest ever.
Today I popped right in super fast.

That’s the weird thing. The server is doing the same thing every day. I didn’t make any changes in the last 24 hours either. The only thing I can see is that the number of attempts by China to access the forum dropped from 260,000 to 200,000 between the two days. That traffic should be blocked before it hits the server for the last 2-3 days so that shouldn’t be affecting it anyway. Consider me puzzled.

Me too. . .!

Appreciate your efforts, Chris. I’m sure it’s been slow in the past and we’ve all thought nothing of it. . .

P.S. Silly question: why are we told "Protected by: Forum Firewall

I’ve looked at the Forum Firewall messages before and they’re inserted by the mod but I couldn’t see a way to get rid of them without disabling part of what the mod does.

Thanks, Chris.

Although things have considerably improved where I still do see an slight delay of maybe between 5 and 10 seconds is the first access. Once on I have not had any issue with delays either browsing the forum or posting. Also as mentioned earlier I have not been logged out by the forum at all. Anyway for me the current status is perfectly liveable with. Thanks Chris for all your hard work and sorry I stirred this up originally :roll:

Stuart

I’m still digging as I get a chance. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of sessions (4-5000) in use. These are for logged in users and tend to last around 90 minutes so that’s a lot to be seeing in such a short times. That’s sent me back to look at the logs and I see a lot of BingBot accesses. The IP addresses for BingBot scans are supposed to come from MSN domains but a couple of IP addresses I’ve looked aren’t linked with any domain so I’m now wondering if there’s another ‘attack’ going on from someone pretending to be BingBot. Time for work soon but I’ll try to investigate some more this evening.

Now it gets tricky. Some of the IP addresses claiming to be BingBot are real (as verified by Bing) but some aren’t. The traffic from both looks pretty identical so it’s likely to be difficult to block one without blocking the real one. I can’t use robots.txt because it’s unlikely that fake bots will respect whatever is put in there anyway.

I’m still left wondering why all this is happening? Why would anyone want to attack an weather forum??

Luckily (?) I’m going to the dentist this morning so had a little longer to investigate. I’ve managed to find some IP sub-nets to block that seems to be stopping the fake bingbot addresses that are being used this morning. No doubt there will be more to block later :roll:

I think you must have spurred them on to greater efforts: I have to record that getting to the site, logging in and showing unread posts was the slowest I have ever seen this morning at about 0945 BST :frowning:

Edit: and about 10 secs to post this. . .