Slow forum access times....anyone but me?

[ozsouth]

Yes about 30 sec delay for me - those blasted bots!

[Fossil]

Yes, same here in the south-west UK, Gloucestershire. Extremely slow. It's ironic that I have to press the 'Submit' button!

[Wiz57]

Yep, sluggish here in OK, USA as well. At one of the other forums I moderate we have had a huge spike in automated bot spams, running into the hundreds of spam posts per hour. I and the other moderators are overwhelmed with the volume of spam as the one centralized CMS we once had was shutdown when the site was sold. Having to open each message to get rid of it is time consuming...my guess is our forum here is being flooded with automated attempts to post junk, rather than the normal junk we ourselves post, haha!

[Jasper]

The site is incredibly slow for me making it barely useable.

Hopefully the issue will be resolved.

[rockedge]

It's the Chinese! This is coming from Hong Kong.

Two IP's which I have now banned completely have been hammering hundreds of thousands of hits on our forum, are the culprits (apparently) and origin.

I have been chasing this problem for 3 days now, attempting to suppress the page requests using all kinds of different tech and techniques. Have a very complex firewall going but not much is helping.

[fredx181]

All day slow, but at (around) this time suddenly fast again for me !

[Sofiya]

yes, either it opens after 2 minutes or there is a server error. impossible to work .
Day 5 this bad thing is going on

[fredx181]

yes, either it opens after 2 minutes or there is a server error. impossible to work .
Day 5 this bad thing is going on

So at this time it's not fast for you ? (it is really ok for me in the Netherlands now, perhaps it's very much depending on where you are, don't know )

[Sofiya]

yes, either it opens after 2 minutes or there is a server error. impossible to work .
Day 5 this bad thing is going on

So at this time it's not fast for you ? (it is really ok for me in the Netherlands now, perhaps it's very much depending on where you are, don't know )

So at this time it's not fast for you ?

now it's working well now

[geo_c]

In US northeast it's been spotty for me today, 20 30 second page loads, at the moment, seems okay, It's intermittent.

[rockedge]

@fredx181 It's much better for me at the moment! I have also turned off the Apache URL rewrite engine and stopped routing requests for http://murga-linux.com to the oldforum for the time being

[fredx181]

@rockedge the url https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/ still connects, well... perhaps best to keep it as is now ? (without access to murga-linux url)

[backi]

......just want to report.....Now working total normal again for me .....here in Germany ......

Best Wishes !

[mikewalsh]

Back to normal again, here.

My thoughts on the matter are NOT that we were singled out on purpose, more that we were simply latched-onto purely at random.......just to see what would come of it. I don't really sense any malicious intent aimed specifically at this community; I just can't see a small, 'niche' discussion forum being targeted in such a manner.

The 'conspiracy' crowd would doubtless go for such, but I just don't see it. There's absolutely nothing here that would be of even remote interest to the Chinese..!

It has to be assumed that whatever mechanism has been employed has at least got the sense to know when it's been blocked. I cannot believe that those bots are STILL hammering away at a now-blocked URL. Maybe the forum's host provider was singled-out by a disgruntled party, and we just got caught up in the shenanigans.

Still.....crazier things have been known. It could have even been a "test run", activated when someone was refining a newly-constructed bot months ago......and then forgotten about, and never de-activated!

Such is life in the modern tech landscape.

Mike.

[rockedge]

My thoughts on the matter are NOT that we were singled out on purpose, more that we were simply latched-onto purely at random.......just to see what would come of it. I don't really sense any malicious intent aimed specifically at this community; I just can't see a small, 'niche' discussion forum being targeted in such a manner.

Yes I agree that we are not singled out. Part of it is faulty program code in the Bots that seem to get hung up like the Knowledge AI Bot which only works with http: and will just begin to open thousands of page requests repeatedly without moving on to another target. It's crawling and worming is not the best. Today the Bots and spiders came from Hong Kong, tomorrow may India or Russia and maybe California.

Some are spam Bots but our htaccess firewall has those under control for the moment but also take up page request time when coming at us in the thousands of page requests. The new Bots are the those now from many different artificial intelligence entities gathering data for the language models and such.

The forums ability to ask a question as the security Captcha really cuts down on almost all automated spam bots....until those get AI that can answer the question accurately to bypass that checkpoint.

[mikewalsh]

Yes I agree that we are not singled out. Part of it is faulty program code in the Bots that seem to get hung up like the Knowledge AI Bot which only works with http: and will just begin to open thousands of page requests repeatedly without moving on to another target.

Yah. And that's an issue that will only get worse, I suspect. For a while, at least.

There's a lot of would-be coders out there, most of whom have neither the time or the inclination to learn coding the old-fashioned, traditional way, through sheer graft, from the ground up. So they make use of the crop of instant code sites that have recently sprung up, almost ALL of which are AI-powered anyway.......imagine that, AIs generating code to create other AIs..!

You can be sure that it never gets debugged or checked-over, or even reviewed. So we end up with dreadful, sloppy code that gets unleashed onto an unsuspecting world.....

Lazy buggers! (*sheesh....*)

Mike.

[keniv]

Back to normal for me too in the north of the UK. Thanks for all the work that's been done to try and make things better for users.

Ken.

[bigpup]

Something to consider.

At the bottom of the main Puppy forum page is a list of who is logged in.

One is Baidu Spider.

This could be some of the cause of slow display.

How to Block Baidu Spider

The only reason for blocking Baiduspider is if you aren’t interested in targeting the Chinese market. You will avoid wasting precious bandwidth that can be used by your visitors and not needlessly slow down your website.

It can also happen that you don't want certain pages to be fetched and indexed by the search engine, such as author pages, tags, and so on. In this case, you will need to block the Baiduspider bot from these specific pages.

To prevent Baiduspider from crawling your website you need to create a robots.txt file. You may use this file to block Baiduspider across the whole website, or only selected pages.

These are some examples of the robots.txt you can use:

To prevent Baidu from crawling throughout the whole website:

User-agent: Baiduspider

Disallow: /

To prevent Baidu from crawling video:

User-agent: Baiduspider-video

Disallow: /

To prevent Baidu from crawling images:

User-agent: Baiduspider-image

Disallow: /

Some users dislike that despite having added the robots.txt file, Baidu may pass over it and continue crawling the website. Other users report that Baidu can be quite aggressive in crawling their website and have experienced problems with the Baidu bot visiting their website too often and too intensively.

If this is the case, and you are not targeting the Chinese audience, you must block the Baiduspider and prevent its crawling from affecting your website speed performances negatively.

In addition to adding the robots.txt, another way to solve this problem is to try banning the Baidu Spider IP on your server domain. This operation may require some time since the search engine uses multiple Baiduspider IPs.

This is a list of some of the many Baidu Spider IPs:

220.181.32.11 220.181.32.16 220.181.32.22 220.181.32.49 220.181.32.51 220.181.32.64 220.181.32.68 220.181.32.98 220.181.50.207 220.181.50.220 61.135.168.131 61.135.168.14 61.135.168.173 61.135.168.39

Another option, if you have PHP on your web server, is to set it to make Baidu wait up to 999 seconds for each page request.

In addition to that, if you want to prevent Baidu from showing a snapshot of your pages, you can use the following meta tag: <meta name=“Baiduspider” content+”noarchive”> and if you don't want specific pages to be indexed go to the classical noindex meta tag: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

This is from an older post about it.

Those are probably not good list of Baidu Spider IPs.

[bigpup]

That Baidu Spider is showing logged in and that is when the forum got slower for me, just now.

Now back to normal speed and the Baidu Spider is not showing as logged in.

[rockedge]

Baidu Spider

I blocked them with a robots.txt rule so we will have to monitor and evaluate.

[Jasper]

@rockedge are these ' Bing & Google bots' safe?

I did try to add the picture as an attachment (jpg) but it does not display correctly.

[rockedge]

are these ' Bing & Google bots' safe?

Yes, safe enough.

[MochiMoppel]

I did try to add the picture as an attachment (jpg) but it does not display correctly.

This problem?

[Jasper]

This was the jpg upload ..... LibreWolf as the browser

[MochiMoppel]

This was the jpg upload ..... LibreWolf as the browser

You should read the link I posted

Solved for me in LibreWolff (Menu -> Settings -> LibreWolf -> uncheck "Enable ResistFingerprinting")

[bigpup]

This is a new one that just showed on the logged in list.

Google Feedfetcher

But it does not seem to be affecting speed, so far.

[vtpup]

The forum is working well here now.

But, I wouldn't be surprised if the internet was totally unusable in five years.

Time to stock up on "Forever Stamps"

[rockedge]

Time to stock up on "Forever Stamps"

6 years ago, just before another increase in the stamp prices I bought $500 worth. Been using them since then and still have some unused rolls. Goes to show how much less actual mail we send anymore. My mailbox can go days now without any substantial post...besides political propaganda and pizza delivery/clean your gutters advertisement magazines.

[vtpup]

Gee I wish I had. They must be worth a couple grand, now!

I honestly believe the web will self destruct in a few years, so you may have made wise purchase! Hope I'm wrong, but we'll see....

[mikewalsh]

Afternoon, gang.

Is it just me.....or re the access times starting to get longer again?

It's been fine till this last week or so, when perhaps every third page-change seems to be taking between 20-25 seconds. Anybody else noticed this? (And this is across a number of Puppies, using several different browsers.......AND taking into account a router re-boot. Which didn't make a scrap of difference.)

Is that AI 'bot' hammering away at the old http links once more?

@rockedge :- I'm not trying to make work for ya, Erik - honest! - but I thought it should at least be mentioned, that's all.

Mike.