New forum software / theme bugs thread

[ExitPlanetDust]

Not just here. I’ve noticed this with other forums I frequent too. I assume it’s the same reason.

[Steven]

Getting intermittent slowness for the past day or so. Sometimes it's fine and other times it's slow, but when it's slow it's not as slow as it has been in the past, fortunately.

[Jonpachi]

Forum has been chugging for me on multiple browsers and devices. Takes about 30 seconds to load the Home page, then another 30 for each tab. This has been consistent for the last week at least, likely longer.

[Steven]

Getting 40+ second load times today again.

And now it's fixed 12 minutes later. Bots taking a break from bot shit, I suppose.

[Jonpachi]

Getting 40+ second load times today again.

And now it's fixed 12 minutes later. Bots taking a break from bot shit, I suppose.

Same. Still experiencing very long loads.

[Steven]

Getting 40+ second load times today again.

And now it's fixed 12 minutes later. Bots taking a break from bot shit, I suppose.

Same. Still experiencing very long loads.

Still having long load times? It seems to be fine now, but it's going back and forth between slow and normal. About 13 hours ago it was slow and now it's good.

[spmbx]

Getting 40+ second load times today again.

And now it's fixed 12 minutes later. Bots taking a break from bot shit, I suppose.

Same. Still experiencing very long loads.

Still having long load times? It seems to be fine now, but it's going back and forth between slow and normal. About 13 hours ago it was slow and now it's good.

It varies all day long. I'm guessing it depends on what AI bot happens to be (not) scraping at any given time.

[Faith]

This is getting bad @_@"...

I tried to do some searching around, and it appears many phpBB forums are affected?

These two posts seemed relevant to this I think:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2662519

~ and ~

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... p=16062124

I have also noticed, that since start of this year, many many more websites are now using Cloudflare and it is quite often I need to click on the Cloudflare "human verification" thing.

Even the official phpBB forum is using Cloudflare and it needed to verify that I am human before I could access those links above.

Is this something that this forum should maybe consider? The lag can be very bad.

It seems about a quarter of the time I notice this forum slow down a lot, sometimes I can click on a link, do some stuff for 5-10 minutes before page load.

At one point, I noticed that a lot of the lag is around when time on clock is xx:00 (so when new hour just reached), so I thought originally maybe some scheduled thing on forum or server was happening which caused the lag. But I guess it makes sense also that it is stupid AI crap that is causing all of these problems.

Also I found this which I think is also relevant:

https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releas ... -at-large/

Cloudflare just launch a feature to block all this AI crawling nonsense.

Is any of this something admins can consider?

I am not familiar with this, but it seems that Cloudflare has a free tier that many forums use.

I am not sure the free tier is suitable for this website, but if it is not and a paid tier is needed, I am willing to help put down a donation to make it happen; and I am sure other members too.

I know these things are long term cost and effort, but this is a community I hold dearly, even if I only started to participate more recently.

<3

[Faith]

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

Still problem today @_@"...

Few hours ago forum was not very responsive.

If you have a bit of time, can also see what other phpBB admins are doing (info in my post above).

But regardless, thank you very much for maintaining this place for us :D

[ryu]

There's also work being done on a freeware solution: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

[Faith]

Think the stupid AI bots are here to maximum bomba the forum again >.<!~

Past 24 hours have been really bad, and even now at the time I type this... login form took 1 min to load, login took another 1 min... then when finally login... I click on post, viewed two pages... then I got logged out automatically... then had to repeat login again. I did not have the logout happen to me before, so that is first time. Before this, about 2 hours ago, I tried, and also load time took many minutes so I decided to try again 1 hour and 2 hours later. So in total for today anyway my experience has been the AI bots target this site for few hours non-stop.

But this started over 24 hours ago.

[Steven]

I got several "could not connect to the server" errors today. Seems fine now, at least.

[Steven]

I think the bots must have used Mao Mao's time stop bomb on the forum because right now is the worst I've ever seen it.

[Udderdude]

Out of control AI bots CONSOOMING the entire internet are pissing me off. Haven't you fuckers got enough data yet already? It won't magically make your next-word-picker any better at this point, you goddamn pricks.

[ExitPlanetDust]

Yep, still intermittently awful. At times it’s so bad that the site is logging me out during navigation.

Edit: Like now. The site froze for almost 2 minutes when I hit submit for this post. And another 1+ when I hit edit to add this.

[SuguriSTG]

i just signed up to the forum and it lags something terible. It feels like trying to load a webpage on DSL if not dialup.

[bbbhltz]

Forums like this sometimes need to work harder to keep the scrapers away. A few of the other phpBB forums I use log users out regularly. Right now it seems fine, but earlier today it was pretty slow.

[Sweatlord_STG]

Forums like this sometimes need to work harder to keep the scrapers away. A few of the other phpBB forums I use log users out regularly. Right now it seems fine, but earlier today it was pretty slow.

its pretty bad most of the time, and its been like this for months now

[Sima Tuna]

We got those dial-up speeds going on. This is certainly the slowest I've seen the forum. Solid minute or two from clicking on a link to transitioning the page. Same for hitting reply, etc.

[system11]

Today's piece of shit company I firewalled the whole IP range of: seranking.com
Edit: and an iphone at Walmart stuck in an infinite request loop
Edit: and Amazonbot and bingbot sending 10 requests a second between them

Honestly there's so little I can do about this other than whack a mole, everyone and their dog has a fucking crawler now - Google even deprecated the rate limit setup they had and have decided they will just hammer your site until it stops responding as a way to know when to back off.

[system11]

I've put it behind cloudflare and blocked MANY bots including google and amazon, lets see how it goes - it'll take some hours before everything is hitting cloudflare anyway.
Edit: already 2/3 of hits are being served via cloudflare now, thats in additional controls on the server end to 403 the worst offenders.

[system11]

Still having trouble, until the new dns has gone worldwide i cant whitelist cloudflare and drop everything else.

[Faith]

I've put it behind cloudflare and blocked MANY bots including google and amazon, lets see how it goes - it'll take some hours before everything is hitting cloudflare anyway.
Edit: already 2/3 of hits are being served via cloudflare now, thats in additional controls on the server end to 403 the worst offenders.

Oh wow awesome thank you so much!!~

Really hope this helps! Earlier this week really had a lot of loading problems again.

Did you also manage to turn on that Cloudflare thingie to block AI bots from crawling site too? My hubby shared that one with me.

Look forward to having less problems, thank you again for helping to keep site up!

Will report if any weird problems!!~

Oh, before forget: I noticed that on this forum, I need not login to use "Search."

Is this your intention for this forum?

Most other forums I use, if I do not login... I cannot use the forum "Search" at all.

I remember reading some other forum admin say they did this so that bots cannot use the forum search which will kill website fast.

For me, I log out often, so noticed this. Wonder if doing that here will help as well.

Also: best luck and wishes with this!!~

[system11]

That's a good suggestion on the search box, I'll take a look - I had to block Amazonbot completely because just yesterday it sent over 300k requests. The scale of the problem is huge in general, as an example I could see from the cloudflare stats that 120 thousand different IPs were seen since setting it active last night. Over 3/4 of the traffic is from China, I don't really want to as I have great sympathy for people having to deal with internet access there, but I might have to just block the whole country.

[Sweatlord_STG]

Honestly there's so little I can do about this other than whack a mole

That's a good suggestion on the search box, I'll take a look

Thank you Sir!

[system11]

Well search should be disabled for logged out users, and known bots shouldnt be able to crawl the site any more according to the settings, but reading around on phpbb forums this is becoming quite a headache for a lot of places, I'm going to speak to a few others about how they are mitigating it.

I also blocked China entirely.

[qmish]

I keep logging out when trying to post a message.

Also site was offline just until recently?

[system11]

Yes I've been doing all sorts of stuff behind the scenes trying to manage this including taking the database or webserver down, flushing session caches etc.

[aak]

Quick links are gone?

[system11]

It was the only way to make it alive again. As soon as I enable the search backend at all which the quick links rely on, it works for a bit and then 'something' wakes up and bam load average 28 and it can't even serve the front page.