Forum has been very slow 2 days now...

[smatovic]

Seems the robot army has now overrun chess programming wiki...

429 Too Many Requests
nginx

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Srdja

From the start page:

Currently it is again looking for a new hosting solution.

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Srdja

Makes me wonder, is there not forum software that not has this problem and can import our database ?

The problem is not the forum software, it is too many requests (robots) for the little server.

Options:

1. harden the Linux firewall further
2. upgrade the hardware to be able to handle more load
3. use a CDN, content delivery network, like Cloudflare to block bot traffic

If Cloudflare is what we need, we should do it.

***edit***
4. a quick and simple solution with some side effects would be to put all forum content into "private", viewable only after login of a user

Anything that helps.

...as with the last time, someone needs to take a look into log files and monitoring tools first to figure out what is going, what causes the high load.

Thanks for your help.

Do you sill have access and willing to implement 4. ?

I have no access to the server or admin backend of the forum anymore. Sorry, but I have no time in spare to engage with TC.

As for 4. - I am not certain this will help, you can try, but, the main page says atm "1269 guests" and general forum says "19 guests" (you can see both numbers at the bottom of the page after login) so I don't know where all the guests are going, maybe it is a kind of DOS attack on the start page. As mentioned, someone has to check the web server log files and monitoring tools to figure what is going on.

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Srdja

[Rebel]

Thanks Srdja.

We will have a look.

[Eelco de Groot]

I have no access to the server or admin backend of the forum anymore. Sorry, but I have no time in spare to engage with TC.

As for 4. - I am not certain this will help, you can try, but, the main page says atm "1269 guests" and general forum says "19 guests" (you can see both numbers at the bottom of the page after login) so I don't know where all the guests are going, maybe it is a kind of DOS attack on the start page. As mentioned, someone has to check the web server log files and monitoring tools to figure what is going on.

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Srdja

Thanks Srdja. Not very important what I think but I think that is probably right.

The number of registered plus hidden users is I think always low. At the moment there are ten registered, plus three hidden, I count eleven registered, Uri Blass, Look, me, the rest registered are the indexing bots from the search engines. (I set my account for hidden but I have said many times it never works. Maybe I count for one of the three hidden also.) The problem does not seem to be with registered accounts (The many anonymous nondescript name accounts that in theory could be sabotage bots), but with the guests then. So thankfully it looks like some DDOS attack like in the past and maybe they all go to the index page (as before).

Commercial sites often have some device that can check if you are a human visitor, without you having to count traffic lights or bicycles, like photography sites do to counter bots that are checking their prices I think. That works pretty fast and gives minimal delay I find, better than the annoying endless traffic light captchas (Example of what I mean are the links to sellers on Ken Rockwell's site with links to cameras and lenses etc.)

Something like that seems much cheaper than a cloud service. But I have no idea how you could protect this phpBB site (like the index page that was attacked last time, as HGM said) that way without first going to a sort of 'gatewatcher' page that can do the checking? It is not something you can easily add to phpBB. Unless someone knows better.

[Eelco de Groot]

As a counterargument to closing the whole forum for guests, without being able to block access to everything but the first page say, the site apparently can handle multiple thousands of guests, (there are 31 guests on this page, where are the rest?) still working, although like molasses.. If all these people were required to log in I think it would crash at maybe less than 50 or 100? That just a guess, but seeing how slow the AI forum is, I get timed out going from page 10 to 9 because the thing has to check if you are logged in and decides you are not (mistakenly) Not allowed to read, first log in please.

The Help and suggestions forum for instance should be accessible to everyone, but never has been although I suggested it to Sam but nobody at the owner side or Sam could do that then. Closing the AI possibly slows everything down and those are just five people on a good day But you guys have to check the logs first Go get them

[tttony]

Is painfuly slow, like 30 seconds to load, I remember there was a time that the site had a captcha and even though it was not the best thing, now I think is the best thing

I've no read the thread but I suppose IA engines are DDOSsing the site right?

[Eelco de Groot]

I am not sure. I think the Captcha was in combination with Cloudflare and when the everything was still running the way it had in New York. With terrible memory constraints and the old phpBB with all the old changes for boards and pgn's and stuff It may have been only in the time the server and software were still all from ICD chess And there were already problems with bots back then and there was no AI (referring LLM companies collecting data, which is not really AI in my mind if I'm sarcastic) then. So I'm not sure of my answer We are a 100 times better of now but bots increased and they are always here. They seem badly designed to be LLM bots like reading threads with many pages over and over again from start to finish.

[Graham Banks]

You could always ask Kirill about how he keeps this from happening with the CCRL forums.

[chrisw]

Announcement of general amnesty to those people banned in the past?

[gerhard]

Something should happen very quick - for me the forum is no more useable - southern germany.
No one able to fix this?

[Essay]

Sadly this forum is proving almost unusable for me now.
It takes countless attempts to get in as a guest, I keep getting a "Forbidden" message.(UK Location)
It takes the same effort to log in as a member, I have even resorted to trying a proxy server, which sometimes works.
But realistically it's just too much effort and if I do manage to get in - it's painfully slow.