New forum software / theme bugs thread

[system11]

Hopefully having to continuously reauthenticate should be fixed.

[Udderdude]

Shit sucks, smaller sites getting squeezed out of the internet even harder than ever before due to this shit. Thanks for your efforts to try to keep it alive. I've noticed a lot of wiki sites getting slammed with this garbage as well, barely even loads half the time.

[aak]

Hope that search can come back eventually.

[system11]

It's back for now, I changed the search backend to a faster one in theory, which was way more painful than expected having to compile from source because PHPBB only uses unsupported versions for which packages and systemd files don't exist. If it vanishes again you know why, at least disabling search is less invasive than any other workaround when the problem occurs.

[system11]

As an aside I found several bot crawlers cache DNS TTL longer than they should - I will be blocking all direct traffic to the webserver port soon unless it comes from cloudflare.

[Sturmvogel Prime]

First the forum slows down and now is forcing Cloudflare Turnstile verification test to log in.
Was it really necessary? Its annoying.

[Sima Tuna]

Sounds like AI and botting are becoming serious issues for forums. Spambots have always been a problem, but not this level of whatever the fuck is happening. So, the AI are just trying to hoover up information? Or are they flinging a million requests at the forum and forcing it to chug/shut down? I'm not technical enough to understand.

[Faith]

First the forum slows down and now is forcing Cloudflare Turnstile verification test to log in.
Was it really necessary? Its annoying.

Yes, I get it too each time now.

But... logging in to reply to your comment... it took 3 seconds.

So... 3 seconds is a super super small price to pay compared to when AI trash slow forum down.

Before Cloudflare... sometimes forum can take 3 minutes load.

And then same for trying log in.

This is small inconvenience we "pay" to fight all of this AI trash.

[system11]

First the forum slows down and now is forcing Cloudflare Turnstile verification test to log in.
Was it really necessary? Its annoying.

Annoying is staying up until 8am the next day trying to mitigate the slowdown, to which Cloudflare was the solution. What kind of verification are you getting? For me it's just doing a quick check when I log in a new session and I'm not having to actually type anything, it's doing a non interactive check. You may not have seen the worst of it but yesterday was load average 28, which is so bad I was having to bring down the database to flush sessions just to make minor config changes in the forum UI. It was essentially dead in the water.

The other solution was disabling search entirely - which sounds minor but also includes things like quick links so you couldn't 'view my posts' etc.

[system11]

Sounds like AI and botting are becoming serious issues for forums. Spambots have always been a problem, but not this level of whatever the fuck is happening. So, the AI are just trying to hoover up information? Or are they flinging a million requests at the forum and forcing it to chug/shut down? I'm not technical enough to understand.

Spambot activity has jumped significantly and they'e been bypassing the capcha I regulary get contacted about by humans struggling. Those don't cause system load too much though. This is the combined weight of poorly behaved search engines. I think you can get a taste from a rant I posted on X last night:

https://x.com/System11b/status/1972160693106250149

As for why it's suddenly very much worse, a number of them were picking up the search URL from somewhere - GPT for example was absolutely fixated on 'unanswered posts' and was causing constant database searches. It was getting this because until a few days ago search was enabled for guests/bots - this is no longer available which is a pity because I liked the idea that we didn't force people to have an account to search for information. They're still trying to access it even now despite this being removed, I don't know how long they will remember that these URLs existed but that was the cornerstone of the problem.

At the moment most are entirely blocked from crawling the site at all - I'm wanting to allow them back in one by one to see how it goes but honestly I was dusting off 20 year old skills yesterday compiling the new search backend as no packages exist and I want a little of my weekend back.

[Sturmvogel Prime]

What kind of verification are you getting?

After clicking on "Log In" it sends me to the "Verify you are human by completing the action below" (Turnstile challenge) where I have to click on the checkbox.
Will the challenge be permanent or just temporary?

[system11]

What kind of verification are you getting?

After clicking on "Log In" it sends me to the "Verify you are human by completing the action below" (Turnstile challenge) where I have to click on the checkbox.
Will the challenge be permanent or just temporary?

Is it every time?

Do you tick the box to stay logged in?

Are you using a VPN service/similar?

[Sturmvogel Prime]

What kind of verification are you getting?

After clicking on "Log In" it sends me to the "Verify you are human by completing the action below" (Turnstile challenge) where I have to click on the checkbox.
Will the challenge be permanent or just temporary?

Is it every time?

Do you tick the box to stay logged in?

Are you using a VPN service/similar?

Everytime I want to log in it pops the "interactive" click the box challenge. Right now its the second time I get the Turnstile challenge before logging in.
Also, I don't use VPNs.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Annoying is staying up until 8am the next day trying to mitigate the slowdown, to which Cloudflare was the solution. What kind of verification are you getting?

SeaMonkey = None (the cloudflare page is blank. so I can't login. I think cloudflare just straight-up blocks SeaMonkey for 'security' reasons)
Firefox = Spinning wheel for a second, then redirects
Chromium = Same as firefox, but seems to take a looonng time before redirect

[qmish]

I'm glad that cloudflare check page only appears during log-in because otherwise it would prevent me from reading forum as guest from my old ipad.

hoping for the best

[system11]

These stats have dropped off across the board by about 40% since yesterday but even then - this is the scale of junk traffic in the world now (last 24hr).

[Faith]

These stats have dropped off across the board by about 40% since yesterday but even then - this is the scale of junk traffic in the world now (last 24hr).

Wow lol so I guess "served by origin" is your server then? So traffic drop from 576K to 31K for you? Big difference @_@"...

Congrats on getting everything working! And big thank you!!~

So far everything working good today! Not had any issues at all and hope that this solution runs smooth for the long term!

nd I want a little of my weekend back.

Really understand how you feel @_@"... sorry all this AI trash give so many problems >.<!~

[m.sniffles.esq]

Just confirming that anything outside of Cloudflare's very narrow definition of "acceptable" is unable to login (including seemingly anything on Windows 7) is throwing the user in a infinite redirect loop. Which I sorta figured, but had a couple minutes this morning to confirm.

I'm guessing the blocking of legitimate traffic is an acceptable trade-off (or else you'd be using a different CDN), but just wanted to confirm cloudflare be cloudflaring.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

The poor site's basically being DDOS'd by how aggressive the crawl bots are? Yikes, awful stuff to have to deal with.

I can confirm the site's much more responsive today than it has been!

[ExitPlanetDust]

Whoa, lots of updates. I was punted off the site so I haven’t checked back in a few days.

Thanks for all the hard work. This AI scraping is beyond absurd right now. It’s crushing so many forums.

[system11]

Just confirming that anything outside of Cloudflare's very narrow definition of "acceptable" is unable to login (including seemingly anything on Windows 7) is throwing the user in a infinite redirect loop. Which I sorta figured, but had a couple minutes this morning to confirm.

I'm guessing the blocking of legitimate traffic is an acceptable trade-off (or else you'd be using a different CDN), but just wanted to confirm cloudflare be cloudflaring.

The decision was: this one has a free tier, there's a PHPBB/Cloudflare howto, it does filtering and can go live in a matter of hours.

Which browser and version is it? I'm guessing it's going to be https or http version issues.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Which browser and version is it? I'm guessing it's going to be https or http version issues.

I ran the gamut of weirdo browsers on win11 and linux (SeaMonkey, Pale Moon, Falkon) and they all just hit a redirect loop.
The win7 machine I think is running Firefox 115 ESR (don't quote me) and some Chromium I'm not even going to take a guess on since it can jump a version number a week (sorry. that was a server and I'm now nowhere near it)

Free users can now do useragent whitelists? If so, that's kinda of amazing. If you go to the cloudflare forum (which at least use to be free users only recourse, and ironically, wouldn't load on browser agents they deemed unacceptable) you'll see people complaining about this going seemingly 10 years back, with absolutely no response from cloudflare.

[Udderdude]

I was able to get past the Cloudflare detection and log in on Pale Moon. Running Windows 10. Not sure what problem you're having with it.

[system11]

Bloody hell... I allowed some of the crawlers back on, fortunately cloudflare is 'handling it'.

Total
865.83k

Mitigated
424.37k

Served by Cloudflare
414.41k

Origin
27.05k

[m.sniffles.esq]

Well, I'm not sure what happened, but the situation has changed somewhat. The redirect loop now shows something with SeaMonkey/Pale Moon rather than just a blank page

Spoiler

(I'll check with Falkon when I get on Linux)

That's the standard cloudflare "this browser agent shall not pass" page. The completely blank page was new to me.

I was able to get past the Cloudflare detection and log in on Pale Moon. Running Windows 10. Not sure what problem you're having with it.

Interesting. I'll screw around with the UA when I get a second. I know Moon was the angriest/most aggressively going after these issues (even going so far as to include "Unfortunately CloudFlare still hasn't pulled their scripts that seem to deliberately cause these issues on Pale Moon and other independent browsers they seem to want to keep from the websites they "protect" " in the release notes a couple months ago) so perhaps something was figured out I'm not hip to. Unfortunately, I'm mostly on SeaMonkey (needing email and irc for work), who tends to take a more relaxed stance toward these things

[paul_]

Site loading is much better already, thank you for working on a solution. Hope cloudflare won't be too much of a pain for people. While some Cloudflare sites won't run for me either due to using a NordVPN IP or because Chrome refuses to load the page, I don't have issues on this site. Fingers crossed.

[Jonpachi]

Spacing is off on iPhone. There’s a black margin only on the right-hand side.

[R79]

"The 600 series had rubber skin..."

[Sweatlord_STG]

i got a warning for the same thing twice by two different mods. pls remove one.

the second one was issued by Shatterhand (a week later or so ), the first one i cant remember, maybe it was bulletmagnet but im not sure.

[Randorama]

Hello System11, I cannot log in to the forum when I am in China, due to the new CloudFlare protection. I also have problems when I am in Italy, but they are manageable. I get the red cross "sorry, you've been blocked" message (China) or I do not pass the verification test (Italy). Is there a way to make the connection more stable? If I cannot see this message, could I kindly ask you to send me a message to my email ([email protected]. Yes, I know that it is not very safe, but just in case...).