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

[Tactalvanic]

It may be the huge number of guests is using up the server resources for valid responses/queries. so we get redirected as the server cannot respond.

a mild case of Distributed Denial of Service.

[Bloggard]

problem/s seem pretty much the same unfortunately.

stats on the left hand-side is showing roughly 18,000 guests at the point of posting, which can't be correct, obvs.

do users need to start contributing so a better server/ software / security can be used?
or is the problem more endemic (i.e. bot arbitrariness).

[krieghund]

Previous post lost to the white void.

Been getting the same issue for the past couple of days, using Chrome.

[robh]

Fewer issues this morning but as others have stated, the problem is still there.

I also notice very strange "views" counts on posts, for example my somewhat obscure request for an OOP MSD card deck in the bazaar has apparently been viewed over 2000 times. Seems unlikely to be genuine as I have not been deluged with people offering to sell me decks.

[WargamesIllustrated]

Hi hi!

I've recently moved us over to Cloudflare and activated all the relevant security measures. I'll get IONOS to restart the server here soon, but hopefully once full propagation completes, these pesky bots won't be back!

Once that's done, we'll be migrating to a different provider.

Cheers again for your patience!

[Severian]

Thanks again for all of your work on this. Things seem better at the moment.

Weirdly, though, the notification email for this thread ended up in my spam folder. Don't remember that happening before (and obviously I get a few emails from that address). Marked it as safe and so on but thought it worth mentioning in case LAF has found its way on to a naughty list somewhere.... this did happen a few years back I think.

[Ultravanillasmurf]

Has anyone else noticed they have rather a lot of unread posts - I apparently have not read anything on the first page of the Cold War section...

[Mammoth miniatures]

Has anyone else noticed they have rather a lot of unread posts - I apparently have not read anything on the first page of the Cold War section...

Yes, I just logged on to find every single thread I'd ever posted in pop back up in my "replies to your posts" list.

[Kourtchatovium104]

Very strange!  Like Ultravanillasmurf, it seems that I've never read anything! 

[zemjw]

yup, just noticed that, along with Cloudflare verifying I'm human on a regular basis.

The guest count is dropping, but still over 10,000...

[YPU]

From other websites friends manage, especially those with some form of image sharing/hosting capacity, there have been a bunch of reports of sudden huge surges of guest visits. The current leading theory is that its AI training database scrapers for text/images. Cloudflare has been a big help for most of them, lets hope that goes here as well.

In fact, besides every post being new to me apparently, issues seem to have gone entirely now.

[Severian]

Yes, no cookie pages for a while here either, but lots of unread posts. They do change to being read once read, though, so not really a problem.

Notification emails still going to spam, despite earlier instructions not to; but that may be an outlook thing, so who knows.

Guest count now at nine and a half thousand and (I think) falling...

[zemjw]

One other, rather annoying issue, is that clicking the "new" icon to go to the last unread post in a thread now drops me back to page 1 of the thread.

This only happens the first time, then it remembers again, but it looks like it's forgotten where I was on every thread I've ever looked at

[Atheling]

Is anyone getting that "Just checking it's you XXX" notice for a few seconds before the forum popping up? 

It's making me nervous! 

[zemjw]

Yup, had it several times. Mostly it just moves on, but I did have to tick the "I'm not a robot" box at one of them. If captchas start to appear, rude words will be uttered!