2025 technical issues (logon delays, Cloudflare, blanks, redirects; SEPTEMBER)

[Westfalia Chris]

I've merged the existing two topics and renamed the new thread to make it, hopefully, more visible.

[Bloggard]

blimey, you could do without this nonsense, Joe. Hope it gets sorted out asap.

[HerbertTarkel]

Had one incident early today, but last few hours seem better?

I have not cleared anything. 

iOS latest version.

[WargamesIllustrated]

Hi!

Current sitrep:

I no longer believe it to be a parked domain nor a .htaccess issue. In fact I think the problem stems beyond that.

On 2 June, the website saw unusually large traffic and IONOS “locked” the database in an act of security. I’ve gone through the site analytics on those days and after to see that the LAF spikes exponentially. My guess is that the site was bot crawled and that led to server outages and downtime.

The redirects we’ve been seeing were IONOS’ automated dns parking filling in for a down website.

When on the phone to IONOS I told them to just restart the server in the meantime to see if we could return to some stability over the weekend.

Of course, I’m still worried that the bots will come back, but for now, it seems to be functioning and I can enjoy my weekend.

I’ll keep an eye on it regardless!

[LouieN]

Thank you for the status report.  Sorry you dealing with this. 

[fred]

Yep, seems much better now. Was unusable at lunchtime.

Do IONOS not have a WAF or similar in front of their sites (or is that a chargeable option)?

[boneio]

LAF used to have Cloudflare in front of it, I'd strongly recommend readding that as bot protection and WAF.

[carlos marighela]

And there was I thinking someone had hired Bill Armintrout to do a software upgrade.

Christ knows where the page redirects would have gone to if he had of course.

[HerbertTarkel]

And there was I thinking someone had hired Bill Armintrout to do a software upgrade.

Christ knows where the page redirects would have gone to if he had of course.

 

[Ultravanillasmurf]

I have had a couple of instances this morning.

Is this due to our AI Overlords slurping the contents of the site?

[Severian]

Got the cookie page once on my way to read this. At time of writing, there are 20 named users online and almost 18000 guests...

[has.been]

This morning some pages give me the re-direct, some, like this one, let me through. 

[Count Belisarius]

I host another small forum (shared hosting) and a month ago we had the same bot activity. Took a while to figure out what was going on (hosting support were useless) and after a lot of faffing with robot.txt files I eventually went the Cloudflare route and from that ID'd the main sources of the bot traffic (Singapore, South Korea, Brazil) and blocked them. It's been pretty stable since. It's only a small forum (phpbb3) so when we were getting 4000 visitors it killed the database.

I've since changed hosting and am now much happier...

[armchairgeneral]

This morning some pages give me the re-direct, some, like this one, let me through. 

Same here. Seems quite random which pages let me through and which go to the cookie page. Just trying the page again sometimes works.

[fred]

I'm getting the cookie page again this morning, perhaps one in 4 clicks on links.

What I have noticed is that on posting a reply, the reply posts, but the refresh of the page to show you your post often fails.

The huge number of guests spotted by Severain seems significant.