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
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.
Thanks for the screenshot. It’s obviously not Cloudflare but maybe something about the way access to the forum works through Cloudflare is triggering these. I have a fairly busy day ahead but I’ll try to figure out what’s happening ASAP.
I see the problem (but not a fix yet). As everyone now accesses the forum through Cloudflare the forum sees you all coming from one of a limited number of Cloudflare ‘egress’ IP addresses. Now that’s not a problem, many ISPs have proxies that combine all their users into a limited number of IP addresses so the forum can live with that.
The problem is that ‘dodgy’ users trying to hack/attack/spam domains access those domains through Cloudflare because the domain owners, like me, want the extra protection Cloudflare provide. That means the Cloudflare egress IPs get associated with the dodgy things that hackers/spammers do and therefore firewalls that act on those IPs associated with dodgy users ‘block’ legitimate users who are seen on those same IP addresses. I hope that makes sense.
My thoughts at the moment are…I can disable the dodgy user checks but I’m not sure if that will lead to more dodgy users in the forum or I can look for a way for the forum firewall mod to ignore the Cloudflare IPs. I’ll have to see what’s possible and what the impact of any solution is likely to be. Please bear with me whilst I investigate and consider the options.