Site slow loading

[Holm86]

Unfortunatly this site has been unusable for long periods these past months ....

[zibby43]

Site is completely unusable. 502 Bad Gateway notices. Slower than 90s dial-up loading time. What on earth is going on?

[Juzh]

i think the problem is either ddosers or forum is simply overloaded by legit users. looking at the stats bottom of the page it looks like forum is getting loads of new attention this year and its breaking records in terms of visitors.

[chrisc90]

Pretty much unusable at present. Surprised these bots even hang round considering they must be experiencing thr same thing. Either that or the problem gets compounded by failed page load attempts and they put more requests in.

I know it sacrifices the new traffic to the site, but think it definitely needs to be locked for users until a solution can be found to this issue. At least genuine posters will still be able to post content. I’m sure the bots could be allowed to index the posts/topics too so would still be indexed on search engines? If genuine people want to browse they will register.

As just posted, 5.1k users online, but only 67 are registered.

[maxxer]

Agree it is so slow now and get errors something is wrong mostly the forum

[mwillems]

Hopefully this can get fixed, it's crazy.

Is it new bots each time evading Robots.txt, or do they bypass its scope entirely?

[Mogster]

Aye. The site is almost unusable now.

[Juzh]

Hopefully this can get fixed, it's crazy.

Is it new bots each time evading Robots.txt, or do they bypass its scope entirely?

robots.txt is merely a suggestion, entirely up to bot to obey it or not. To be sure you have to block their IPs

[mwillems]

Hopefully this can get fixed, it's crazy.

Is it new bots each time evading Robots.txt, or do they bypass its scope entirely?

robots.txt is merely a suggestion, entirely up to bot to obey it or not. To be sure you have to block their IPs

Yeah but I thought Amazon, Google and Co largely behaved unless they went through a link. But yeah, you can block the IPs but if new ones pop up you'll be exposed again.

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.rob ... metrics.md

ByteSpider is one of the few that doesn't respect it. I assumed it would be from China and it is. Apparently it bombards with requests more than any other crawler, and constantly changes IP. Apparently the only way to block it is with firewall rules, and even then there are reports that it creates fake agent names.

I had no idea how much of an issue this was.

[djos]

Pretty much unusable at present. Surprised these bots even hang round considering they must be experiencing thr same thing. Either that or the problem gets compounded by failed page load attempts and they put more requests in.

I know it sacrifices the new traffic to the site, but think it definitely needs to be locked for users until a solution can be found to this issue. At least genuine posters will still be able to post content. I’m sure the bots could be allowed to index the posts/topics too so would still be indexed on search engines? If genuine people want to browse they will register.

As just posted, 5.1k users online, but only 67 are registered.

It’s probably all the users Hollus sent on holidays!

[Greg Locock]

502 is back today and yesterday

[Cs98]

Site feels great, much slower than before.... argh.

-Fernando Alonso, 2017.

[FromGP2toWDC]

Getting bad gateway 504, very slow or not loading at all.

[101FlyingDutchman]

A miracle. Fast as lightning now. Weird!

[chrisc90]

A miracle. Fast as lightning now. Weird!

Steven did some work with how the site is accessed, so you will need cookies enabled in order to be allowed access. It was something the bots werent using when bombarding the side