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Re: Upgrades
Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:46 pm
by CCoburn
Cerber wrote: ↑Mon Oct 13, 2025 3:54 pm
Yes, something like that. Most of the time they just come in bursts, in waves, flooding website with requests. Some of them identify themselves, others don't, some of them throw thousands of requests from few IPs, others throw handful of requests from thousands of IP's, it varies, but the end result is often exhausted resources account/website (CPU&RAM), then nothing is left for server to use to generate and serve page for normal human visitors, if one happen to come at that time.
In a "shared" environments individual accounts (websites) have quotas set for resources, so if some individual website gets flooded by bots it shouldn't cause problems for the rest of the server, normally, but these days hosting providers oversell resources to such degree that server might have enough resources only for handful of sites to be very busy at the same exact time, so everything is fine only as long as bots and crawlers are not flooding multiple sites on the same machine, otherwise things escalate and deteriorate fast. Linux machines have that funky quirk were those tend to get very unresponsive if the whole machines runs out of RAM, and often need full reboot to recover, unless guys manage to deal with the issue in time. Our current host seem to be struggling a little, at times, server was rebooted at least twice already in a month, which is a lot imho.
That makes sense that it would be the site and/or the server if multiple sites were flooded. I wonder if site selection by these AIs/bots is just random brute force or if there are any selection criteria or something that keeps them returning to a specific site.
As for the AIs, I wonder what their purpose is if they're not spamming anything. Maybe they find something worthwhile on some occult forums to supplement their data centers/language models.
Anyway, from the activity I've seen over the past couple days it looks like you may have done something and that it is working; maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe you are blocking IP locations. I did notice once though that the guest count exceeded 300.
Re: Upgrades
Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2025 11:27 pm
by Cerber
I've expanded block list with couple more entries 2 days ago.
Re: Upgrades
Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2025 5:38 pm
by Cerber
Just to let everyone know, this coming weekend will "maintenance weekend", but I'm not going to actually put forum in maintenance mode, so forum remains fully fictional, to the most part at least, but there's possibility of something breaking, something stopping working at random times, briefly, without any advance warning.
So before actually posting any longer posts you might want copy of your text, because there will be non-zero chance of things temporarily breaking while you're typing.
From Friday until Sunday I'll be trying to resolve the last remaining issues, including issues with DMs.
Re: Upgrades
Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2025 12:24 pm
by CCoburn
Cerber wrote: ↑Tue Oct 14, 2025 5:38 pm
Just to let everyone know, this coming weekend will "maintenance weekend", but I'm not going to actually put forum in maintenance mode, so forum remains fully fictional, to the most part at least, but there's possibility of something breaking, something stopping working at random times, briefly, without any advance warning.
So before actually posting any longer posts you might want copy of your text, because there will be non-zero chance of things temporarily breaking while you're typing.
From Friday until Sunday I'll be trying to resolve the last remaining issues, including issues with DMs.
I come from a long lineage of defunct forums if that ends up being the case, and it's better to have something than nothing. This forum doesn't auto-save text like some of the writing forums anyway, so fumbling on the keyboard sometimes catapults unsubmitted text into oblivion, although the back/forward navigation arrows may recover it some of the time.
Re: Upgrades
Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2025 1:16 pm
by Cerber
Lack of automatic draft saving always been a bit of a nuisance, but it's inherent default behaviour of phpbb boards. I find annoying annoying enough to look in to addressing that in some way, but a bit later.
First I need to clear everything of my immediate to-do list (pre-existing issues, bugs, post-migration issues, upgrade/update all core components, etc), and once everything neat and tidy and working as ancients intended it, then I'll look in to adding some minor "quality of life improvements".
I'll have a bit more free time in the coming few weeks, we'll have it all fixed.
Re: Upgrades
Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2025 4:38 pm
by CCoburn
Cerber wrote: ↑Wed Oct 15, 2025 1:16 pm
Lack of automatic draft saving always been a bit of a nuisance, but it's inherent default behaviour of phpbb boards. I find annoying annoying enough to look in to addressing that in some way, but a bit later.
First I need to clear everything of my immediate to-do list (pre-existing issues, bugs, post-migration issues, upgrade/update all core components, etc), and once everything neat and tidy and working as ancients intended it, then I'll look in to adding some minor "quality of life improvements".
I'll have a bit more free time in the coming few weeks, we'll have it all fixed.
I'm usually well into a post without thinking to copy to the clipboard, but writing in Wordpad is a good safeguard, so I just do that most of the time.