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 
Edit: and about 10 secs to post this. . .
I just logged out and back in again and it too about 10 seconds to login. Not sure why anyone would not stay logged in forever as I have always done as I visit the site more than once per day. Still seeing about 10 seconds for first access after I boot the PC but then everything seems to work quite well with no significant delays.
Stuart
I think I’ve stemmed the flow of the fake BingBots for now. Instead of the webserver logs scrolling rapidly up the screen they now scroll in small increments so the load on the server appears to be much lower. Remains to be seen if that improves anything though.
Its lightning fast atm👍
It seems faster to me too. The number of active sessions is tumbling too. It was peaked at about 5000 when I first looked this evening. It’s down to 1700 and still dropping now. The active sessions is one indicator of how active the forum is so it’s about 30% of the earlier peak at the moment which is going the right way.
Sent you an email about an hour ago…I was getting a 522 error when contacting the website. Just now was able to connect and login. Thanks for all your hard work to keep the forum up and running Chris.
I know what caused the 522 error. Fixed now but I now need to look at the BingBot again. They might not be fakes but I need to calm them down.
BingBot seems to be throttled to a page per second now so lets see how that goes. I don’t know how fast it was going before but the log file is scrolling past slower than it was.
It seems much faster to me this morning.
And me! Yesterday was dire, today is really fast.
Lightning Fast Speed this morning, Chris.
Thank you for exterminating those bugs!
Yes, Lightning fast this morning!
Thanks Chris!
Ken
Yes still fast, really great 
A pleasure to scroll through posts and opening the forum.
I take it that the permission page that I have had twice today is part of your measures to control the bots
Unlikely, do you have a screenshot?
Ive had numerous pages to answer some math before going to the forum the last couple of days…
no have not unfortunately but will if it happens again
if Chris has not done this then this is worrying
It would appear I am not the only one