Upgrades

[CCoburn]

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.

[Cerber]

I've expanded block list with couple more entries 2 days ago.

[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.

[CCoburn]

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.

[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.

[CCoburn]

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.

[Cerber]

While I was chasing after some obscure ghostly bugs, I found what seems to be a fairly thick layer of artefact data in database, about two thirds in number of tables and about half in actual megabytes - is just a sedimentary layer of old data, from old defunct incarnations of this place, that's not being used in any way now.
Which got me thinking, that perhaps it's easier and better to just take time to catalogue what's needed and important and extract that and then rebuild forum on a clean new installation with data that is actually being used and is important, rather than keep on stacking more layers of duct tape.
But they say "don't fix what's not broken (very badly)", so not sure, still debating what's the best direction from here.

[Amor]

So do the timeline experiment:

- decide to rebuild - then project forward to Jan 2026 to feel if you are happy with that

- decide not to rebuild and again project forward to feel if you are happy with that

[Cerber]

So do the timeline experiment:

- decide to rebuild - then project forward to Jan 2026 to feel if you are happy with that

- decide not to rebuild and again project forward to feel if you are happy with that

Well if thinking like that..

- not to rebuild - then I feel, most likely I can eventually patch it all up, or at least to clear most of the bugs, but by the end I might be too exhausted for anything more, beyond just keeping in a working state for somebody else to take over, eventually, some years later on - so not particularly "happy",

- to rebuild - then I feel, it's going to be a lot of effort, and while at the end forum would be in a clean and working state, it will be ~99% the same, because it's quite a chore to get anything out of phpBB , beyond it's intended look, feel and function, and my motivation to battle with it is very limited - so maybe a little happier, but not massively so,

..but there's a third option: rebuild/migrate from phpBB to SMF (Simple Machines Forum) - that one looks so much nicer, if I could make it work on that, without anyone noticing too much of a difference, I'd be quite happy.

[Cerber]

Actually, what do people prefer, based on all of your personal experience with other forums?
If we ignore things like general vibe of the community and content, etc, and just focus on the feel, aesthetics and usability of the platform, the application behind it, with which one you guys feel more at home with?

A: phpBB (used here now on occultforum.og),
B: SMF (as used by many other forums, ie: "wizardforums"),
C: Don't mind, either looks fine,
D: Something else entirely.

But please keep in mind, when it comes to aesthetics, all of the forums apps/platforms can be customised with themes, so switching to one or another doesn't necessarily mean it will look like some other forum, but few elements here and there might look similar. However functionality would be largely same, or very similar.

[CCoburn]

Re: Forum Considerations


1. Load speed: nothing lagging that I notice as of late.

2. Aesthetics: well structured; no harsh or glaring colors that are hard on the eyes.
The current theme satisfies all that.

3. Functionality: auto saving of unsubmitted text can be a useful feature at times but there are workarounds. A larger edit window would be nice for late caught errors, revisions, and replacing defunct videos; the worst are the mistakes noticed immediately after the window closes.

It would look better if the body text wrapped in the same container that the video is displayed but aligning center is an okay workaround for that.

This place isn't over-moderated which is good; other places are over-moderated circle jerks.

I wouldn't sacrifice load speed for aesthetics, but the forum software makes no difference to me. Participation is low but traffic seems okay. Nothing crucial worth mentioning at the moment.

[Cerber]

3. Functionality: auto saving of unsubmitted text can be a useful feature at times but there are workarounds. A larger edit window would be nice for late caught errors, revisions, and replacing defunct videos; the worst are the mistakes noticed immediately after the window closes.

In regard to timer for edits, I can extend it a bit, to 24h perhaps. Outside of that window, there's always option to DM me any edits anyone needs, I'm happy to do that. The point of that time is to mitigate certain types of spam and abuse.
Ideally, for long term, I think I'd prefer that feature to be permission/rank based, rather then having one global timer for all. At some point people can and should be trusted with it permanently, makes sense so. I suspect the only reason, or main reason, it's not so yet is "skill issue", to put it simply. Permissions system in phpbb is so convoluted, layered, overlapping, that nobody was able (or willing) to setup anything beyond just basic functionality.
The worst part, imho, even for some relatively "simple" configurations phpbb devs themselves suggest third party mods. Why would you give me a 500 pages and tabs, with 500 toggles and buttons in each, if at the end of the day, to get those buttons do something useful, I still need some third party mod installed?.. Drug abuse is a serious issue amongst programmers.
So anyway, that was one of the main reasons I was exploring alternatives to phpbb. But hard doesn't mean impossible, so whichever way we opt to roll, that issue with permissions and edit timers will be resolved in some more graceful way, ie "anyone with certain rank will have no limit on edit times".