New forum software / theme bugs thread

[system11]

Italy should work - are you using a VPN while there? China - well, that is simply blocked, on purpose. Reason: infinity fake accounts and the very vast amount of all spam traffic was coming from there (mostly from gigantic companies line alibaba), which sucks for Chinese people and it's not what I wanted.

[Herr Schatten]

Did I miss something or why is the off-topic board only visible when I'm logged in? Not that it really bothers me, as I'm logged in most of the time when visting the forum anyway, but I'm curious what's the reasoning behind this.

[system11]

It was a user suggestion that seemed like a good idea - no sense in having all that in search results.

[Steven]

I think something is broken somewhere or maybe the bots have returned. I got a bunch of could not connect to server errors and also a single SSL handshake failed error trying to get to this page, which took about 10 minutes. I wonder if this will successfully post when I press submit...

[system11]

Yeah there's some kind of bullshit going on again, not sure what. Loads of places in south america and the middle east simultaneously started doing similar traffic on a matching curve.

It's probably some miserable brand new AI crawler, written by people who I wish only the most miserable lives for.

[Sima Tuna]

Yeah there's some kind of bullshit going on again, not sure what. Loads of places in south america and the middle east simultaneously started doing similar traffic on a matching curve.

It's probably some miserable brand new AI crawler, written by people who I wish only the most miserable lives for.

I admin on a different forum that uses phpbb and we recently went down from absurd amounts of traffic. It's just a tiny forum for a few people, and we were suddenly getting four thousand users on at a single time. When there should be maybe a hundred. The forum slowed to a crawl and was eventually taken offline under the strain.

I wasn't the site owner, so I don't know the exact fix that was used, but I do know that last time we had this problem, we had to block IP ranges. I think this time, ironically an AI tool was used to weed out the scraper bots.

I don't know if making the website sign-in-to-view would fix the problem? Can the scraper bots even scrape any data if they can't access the information? That's going to be the next step for us if this continues. Anyway, we were down for a few days and then right as we came back up, I noticed this place was down. Figured it wasn't a coincidence. Whatever bot coordination is happening is probably hitting a bunch of forums the same way at the same time.