New forum software / theme bugs thread

[Warp_Rattler]

As I've increasingly been thinking Deep Thoughts about the oversaturation of our lives with online media in contrast with the tangible benefits it brings us, the forum's loading speed over the past week has been a pleasant, nostalgic return to simpler days, browsing the web one site at a time in 28.8k dial-up.

[Lander]

I'll second the yearning for simpler times, though will pass on the parts that involve Tiscali and Muuuuum, the voicemail's clogging up the internet again!

[Udderdude]

Next thing you know, you've been knocked offline because your little brother picked up the phone .. >_>

[BIL]

OMFG, speedy once ageen! :O Machine comes alive? :3 Not to jinx lol lmao EDIT: Oh hell no, the realm of the supernatural is real >83

[system11]

My life is shitty right now, so I'm not around much - nobody pinged me about this until this afternoon.

Blame the Alibaba cloud - absolutely hammering the server with requests from multiple IPs, I can't tell if it's malicious or some kind of unintendedly stupid web crawling, so I've had to just firewall it off completely and contact their abuse team.

[BIL]

Cheers boss

[Starfighter]

My life is shitty right now, so I'm not around much

I hope things turn around for you, hang in there!

[Lander]

Ah, smooth and responsive! Much appreciation for the fix

And fingers crossed that life improves - hang in there!

[Sima Tuna]

Forum is faster than Sonic the Hedgedog now. Big thanks to system11.

[Ms. Tea]

Sorry you've been having a rough one; really hope things get better soon. Thanks so much for everything you do running the forum.

[Warp_Rattler]

Zippy and smooth on my end as well, sorry if the connection speed jokes came off as passive-aggressive (though I did have a moment of genuinely pleasant nostalgia for a time when browser features and web speeds meant you gave your full attention to one website at a time rather than flit distractedly through tens of open tabs). The amount of time and effort put into keeping this forum up and running (in an era where these kinds of forums and their communities are an endangered species) has got to be immense, but I'm sure it's not putting any words into anybody else's mouth to say we're grateful for it.

So: thanks for all the work you do, system11, and I hope that the IRL shittiness turns around soon!

[ryu]

Should be low priority but I thought I'd mention it: The text box when leaving feedback displays white text on white background

[system11]

Should be low priority but I thought I'd mention it: The text box when leaving feedback displays white text on white background

Thanks, this is fixed now.

[Steven]

It's back to taking six days for anything to load again.

edit: seems better now

edit 2: it's doing it again

[ryu]

It's not as awful as that time when the forum was basically unuseable but I'm noticing it too.

edit: nvm, it's unuseable sometimes

[system11]

I only just saw a message about this - it seems ok now?

[system11]

It's these people:

https://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-47-74-0-0-1.html

I have blocked their latest set of subnets, and since they ignored my abuse report last time, I've publically requested on X a full list of their subnets so I can block the fucking lot of them.

[Steven]

It's doing it again, but only sometimes. Last night I couldn't even access the site because it kept timing out.

It was fine a few minutes ago, but now it's back to taking a relatively long time to load.

It timed out again just now trying to edit this message to say that I tried a different computer and even my Vita and it still timed out on both of those as well. I wonder if it's going to time out when I attempt to submit this edit...

16 minutes later edit: a few minutes ago it timed out again but now it's fine. Weird. Anyone else experiencing this inconsistency?

[system11]

Today's 100% certified pieces of shit:

1) Googlebot (66,000 hits)
2) Tencent (260,000 hits)

I had to block 910,000 IPs due to Tencent, a pile of /16 netblocks because it was the only way to quickly deal with it.

[EmperorIng]

Insane, just chinese botnet trying to flood the server?

Thanks for being on it, man!

[Steven]

Damn, it's like Tencent bots are trying to DDOS the forum. They did a pretty good job of it about 14 hours ago, too.

Thanks for the fix, and so fast, too!

[system11]

They're indexing it, just far too aggressively.

[BIL]

Nicely done boss. Exceedingly rare this place ever misses a beat, I figured it was the bots again.

[Steven]

Recently I've noticed my anti-virus giving me notifications of blocking suspicious connections in the high score section whenever I click on a thread. Just now it gave me one when I clicked on the Same! Same! Same! thread. Checked some more (think it was Blue Revolver, Strikers 1999, and a few others) and it happened again. It doesn't seem to happen all the time, as nothing happened when I clicked on the CRS 68K thread, but I figured it might be better to bring it up just in case. This is the notification that it gave me for the ones where it did happen:

firefox.exe attempted to establish a connection relying on an unmatching security certificate to www.kollision.biz. We blocked the connection to keep your data safe since the used certificate was issued for a different web address than the targeted one.

Posting the URL turns it into a hyperlink, but I'm not gonna click on that shit and nobody else should either.

[system11]

That's going to be an image someone has in the thread, I'll see if I can trigger it myself.

Edit - it's nothing to worry about, just someone's personal site isn't set up properly for SSL.

[Steven]

Cool, thanks!

[parodius]

Not sure if this the best place to report this or if it has already been reported elsewhere, but the forum has been pretty sluggish for the past few days.

Edit: well it was slow when I posted this, but now it seems to be pretty quick.

[system11]

Over the past few days there's been a new wave of harvesting bots, most recently Microsofts IP range associated with openAI.

[BIL]

Cheers boss! m(_ _)m Did wonder if they were up to it again. it's a testament to the forum's usual lightning-quick performance that these dips are noticeable at all.

[EmperorIng]

I imagine these little cunt robots are trying desperately to farm the farm for shmup knowledge in order to appear knowledgeable for goobers on their google searches.

Well, the joke's on them! We don't know what the fuck we're talking about here!