Task force TalkChess access

[Eelco de Groot]

Yes, absolutely that is much better. If the admin can keep it that way the crash resistance of the board should be better. But I don't know if HGM and Srdja actually have taken new measures, if they have, they are not saying what, not here. But keep fingers crossed.

[hgm]

No we haven't done anything, as there is nothing we can do. It is all up to Quentin, who has to give instructions to his provider concerning the IP blocking. About a month ago he had all blocking lifted, but shortly afterwards that the server crashed. (MySQL had died.) Then Quentin restarted the server, with the IP blocking re-instated, so that I was practically locked out again.

Quentin sent me the server log of that event, and the only suspect thing I could see in it just before the crash was that the number of requests went up by more than 50% in the minute before the crash, and that virtually all these requests were from bots. Even though the bots weren't doing anything that seemed particularly harmful. (Most were just retrieving posting texts through viewtopic.php.) So my conclusion was that the software is not robust against overloading, and is too easily swamped with bots. The general solution for controlling bot access and limiting it to a bearable intensity is having a file robots.txt on the website. We did not have one. So I told Quentin he should install one (initially keeping out all bots), and that this might be enough to prevent crashes even without IP blocking.

Sure enough, the next day my access to TalkChess was restored (not a single 403 for me, since then), and a robots.txt file was present. So I assumed the IP blocking was lifted, and we were ready to see if the server now would survive that. Indeed we also haven't had any crashes yet. But recently I learned that many people are still suffering 403 errors. So it seems some degree of IP blocking is still active; I have no idea why it doesn't hurt me anymore. Something must have changed.

Today I asked Quentin to make sure with his provider that all IP blocking is switched off. He said he would do that Monday, because he doesn't want to risk a server crash in the weekend.

[Tibono]

Really and definitely pissed of with this forum. Still those silly 403 errors.
Please remove my account.
Anyway I remove the link from my favorites and intend to never get back to it.
Too much is too much!

[jp]

No (reading) access problems for me, but posting problems for a long time now. It often says, "You need to be logged in to post," even when one is logged in, etc.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[Eelco de Groot]

Hi JP,

I think that practically everybody has faced this same posting problem at times. I was able to post this directly without being logged out, I think because I checked the 'remember me' button when logging in. When that works you are checked in again. But sometimes I think that does not work? Problem, possibly, is related to not remembering session IDs correctly , or it was deliberately introduced somewhere to keep spambots at bay. Nobody knows exactly I think.

[Sylwy]

This morning:

[Sylwy]

............

This morning (again):

[Modern Times]

Luckily for me, it has been problem-free from the UK for some time now.

[Sylwy]

...........again.............

[Graham Banks]

I get the 'forbidden' error at least once daily all of a sudden.