Anyone having trouble with initial access to the 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. . .

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 :smiley:
A pleasure to scroll through posts and opening the forum.:+1:

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

Sounds like what I reported in reply #134 on page 9. . .

Cloudflare does put captcha type challenges in for some circumstances. I’ll have to look at the possible reasons. I know one is when you come from a blocked country, but I’ve only blocked China and I don’t think any of you are coming from there unless the GeoIP database use messed up and has your IP associated with China.