Is the site working as expected?

[NoelWell]

When I go to my profile functions such as 'your content', I get this:

 

[EricJ]

Same thing for me, I get that same error.

 

[Hobbit]

OK. Thanks for letting us know. We've recently moved platforms and this could be an unexpected result of that. I'll alert the cyberelves, and see what we can do.

 

[NoelWell]

Migrations are always tricky, says an IT pro with 30 years of experience

 

[Hobbit]

Migrations are always tricky, says an IT pro with 30 years of experience

Thanks, Noel. I understand so! I'll try and give you an update as soon as we have one.

 

[daigoro]

This has actually been the case for years and is a side effect of having the internal search engine turned off. I hope it’s something we can live with, as I’d prefer to keep it disabled to help reduce resource usage.

 

[JenniferRP]

I've been getting rate limited and having to prove I'm human every time I come here for months. Kept meaning to post about it. It's only this site, so I don't have malware or anything.

The migration doesn't seem to be helping.

 

[daigoro]

I've been getting rate limited and having to prove I'm human every time I come here for months. Kept meaning to post about it. It's only this site, so I don't have malware or anything.

The migration doesn't seem to be helping.

This is another measure that was implemented prior to the summer. The website experienced frequent attacks from bots and various types of DDoS attacks, which often resulted in crashes. While I understand that this may be somewhat frustrating, it is essential for keeping malicious actors at bay and ensuring smoother operation of the site.

 

[JenniferRP]

Daigoro, it is affecting me 100% of the time. 100%. I am not a bot. Is there anything we can do here? My interest in coming here has descended below zero.

It's anything up to five minutes of lag every time. I realize I'm one person, but...I am probably the one affected person who is still bothering with it...most people would have already deleted the bookmark.

If it's affecting a real person *every single time they attempt to load the site* then it's not working correctly. Occasional is one thing.

 

[daigoro]

I'm definitely open to any suggestions for handling this more effectively. Currently, there are two main measures in place:

• The "Are you human?" challenge, which is designed to be a quick verification step. It should never take more than a few seconds.
• Rate limiting, which blocks further requests for 10 seconds if someone tries to access more than 50 items within 10 seconds.

Given our limited budget, I haven’t found a more efficient solution to block malicious traffic while keeping the site operational. Our server isn't powerful enough to handle bots and attacks, and we don't have the resources that companies do to implement a more sophisticated approach. That's why we ended up relying on Cloudflare and its challenge system.

 

[AtramentousFlux]

Rate limiting, which blocks further requests for 10 seconds if someone tries to access more than 50 items within 10 seconds.

Hi, not sure how the 50 items is calculated, but if I simply go to sffworld.com and then click on the discussion forum link without waiting, I get the rate limited error. Surely that can't be the intended behaviour?

 

[daigoro]

I experimented with the setup myself and found that clicking through a few pages worked smoothly for me. However, I will increase the limit now and monitor the situation to determine if that leads to more issues with increased attacks or not.

 

[JenniferRP]

The challenge system is dependent on CloudFlare. Sometimes it takes a few seconds. Sometimes it takes get-a-cup-of-coffee time. That's not under your control.

For some reason, it has decided my IP is a threat and I have to be checked out every time. It's honestly a mystery as to why...it shouldn't be happening...and eventually it should work out I'm not a problem, but that doesn't seem to be happening. It's lasted through a rooter reboot. Maybe it doesn't like Verizon? I do not normally have this problem with CloudFlare... In fact, I have never had this problem with CloudFlare before. The very occasional check now and again, but not 100% of the time on a specific site like this.

And I also do VERY occasionally get rate limited just clicking through to the discussion forum, like Atramentous mentioned.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

CloudFlare and Google "human detections" are menaces. Also Google search is worse every year. I use Qwant now.
If the internal search is limited to logged in users and properly engineered it should be a negligible overhead.

Also some sites I get a challenge that can be more than 10 sets of images, stupidly AFTER I've logged in. FORTUNATELY I've never encountered that here.

One ereader related site is seeing DDOS attacks of over 100,000 connections.

Many sites are hit by AI data scraper bots , which seem up to 1000 worse than bots for search engines.

Big corporations, nation state agencies and criminals (in that order) are wrecking the Internet.

 

[Mostlyharmless]

Recently, I get Page Cannot be Loaded unless I allow J-script for this site. Is this intentional? I thought the site was down for the first few days.

 

[daigoro]

The site is running on standard Wordpress and Xenforo software and if you mean JavaScript I would think the answer is yes. Maybe the Wordpress part works without it, but I would expect the interactive nature of the Xenforo forum software to heavily rely on JavaScript.