Apologies for the downtime guys. We've been down now on both Christmas and New Years. I believe I have tracked the most likely culprit to spam bot attacks of some kind. These attacks are maximizing the capacity of the server which then causes the host to throttle the site and close it down.
I believe I know what measure will help the problem substantially, but I need to speak with someone with the right tech expertise before I implement the plan as I've always been taught to avoid pressing random red buttons.
In any event thanks for your patience and continued loyalty.
Happy New Year! First post of 2025! :Party: :Nerd:
You must have upset one of those bots/spammers you removed. They contacted their friends for revenge.
Quote from: bobarossa on January 02, 2025, 07:42:14 AMYou must have upset one of those bots/spammers you removed. They contacted their friends for revenge.
It's ridiculous. Managing them has become a real chore. Whomever creates these time wasters is scum.
And now the bots are being created by bots.
"Droids making droids: how perverse!"
There have been at least 8 attempts to register new accounts in the last two hours or so.
Lame. Is there a way to determine legit account creations vs bot spam?
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on January 02, 2025, 09:49:28 AMLame. Is there a way to determine legit account creations vs bot spam?
I'm not sure how to tell the difference between a "bot" account or one that has been created by an actual human. Fortunately, it's pretty obvious for the most part to tell whether a new account is created for the purpose of spam or mischief. It is a very labor intensive job to police them all. Given the frequency of new accounts, I have to assume most of them are coming from Skynet, or some similarly maligned derivative.
Maybe all those drones in your neck of the woods are even more sinister than we're being told.
No problem Boss. The Grogheads can be down, but never out. My Wife does Internet Security for a local banking corp. and she deals with this kind of shit practically every day, all day. Glad it's not my job. :HideEyes:
Quote from: Sir Slash on January 02, 2025, 10:39:05 AMNo problem Boss. The Grogheads can be down, but never out. My Wife does Internet Security for a local banking corp. and she deals with this kind of shit practically every day, all day. Glad it's not my job. :HideEyes:
Just she have any interest in moonlighting for Grogheads? :twirl:
Maybe Slash can offer her favors!
Re Skynet: our mistake may be in deprecating the alternate canon sequel AIs. :tongue:
I am afraid the Wife keeps very busy dealing with all the Internet Riff-Raff, the IT idiots, and....supporting me. Husbands like me don't come cheap or easy. :cool: I'm wondering if maybe somebody has it in for you JH? Could this be a personal thing you think?
Quote from: Sir Slash on January 03, 2025, 11:54:16 AMI am afraid the Wife keeps very busy dealing with all the Internet Riff-Raff, the IT idiots, and....supporting me. Husbands like me don't come cheap or easy. :cool: I'm wondering if maybe somebody has it in for you JH? Could this be a personal thing you think?
While there is no shortage of people who think I'm an asshole, this doesn't seem like that sort of thing.
I know there are technical issues that are causing this and which can and will be addressed. I have a guy who is going to work on it.
In the meantime, while we are having frequent outages, please don't forget we are on facebook and have a discord. If we're down, I will try to post updates on the discord. Please be sure to join the channel if you haven't already.
https://discord.gg/QEQYs7N (https://discord.gg/QEQYs7N)
I was getting worried there when the website and forum weren't showing up. Thanks for getting both online again!
Quote from: WallysWorld on January 03, 2025, 05:11:51 PMI was getting worried there when the website and forum weren't showing up. Thanks for getting both online again!
There will probably be further outages, but I assure you they will be temporary. Thanks for your patience.
I'm going to be running some significant software updates this weekend. Please excuse any downtime. Hopefully, this will help us run a tighter ship in the long run.
Godspeed. :judge:
EDIT: First attempt didn't work, so I rolled back. I'm now waiting for my expert before I break anything irretrievably. I believe he is a few hours behind me on the globe.
My personal motto: Adjust, Adapt, and wait for Backup.
Well...that was disappointing. While the software updates were necessary, they clearly did not address the resource capacity issue leading to temporary outage.
I think this is still related to automated bot activity and while we seem to have been successful in keeping spammers off the site, it's not stopping them from trying to connect.
We will not give up on trying to resolve this.
Thanks for sticking with us and bearing with the temporary downtime.
This is not normal :
Online: 1,280 Guests, 2 Users (7 Spiders) - Most Online Today: 1,518 - Most Online Ever: 2,291 (Yesterday at 09:48:21)
Just wondering : could it be the Russia posts that attract those 'guests' ?
That's a good point. I did not know we allowed spiders on this site, though I'm not anti-spider at all. Seven does seem like a lot though at one time. And 7 Russian spiders would be even worse. :laugh:
But think yow cool it'd be if you could stack them one inside another.
Quote from: Silent Disapproval Robot on January 08, 2025, 11:42:10 AMBut think yow cool it'd be if you could stack them one inside another.
That sounds like the start of a tyrannid outbreak. :HideEyes:
(Spiders on the internet are usually okay, btw; they're programs which index sites for search engines, 'crawling the web' as it were.)
Ohhh. So not the hairy jumping kind. Too bad. I had the image in my head of little eight-legged skittering things with Putin faces. :hideunderbed:
Still sounds like a Tyrannid outbreak. :evil: