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

[Ultravanillasmurf]

This morning (UK time) I got bounced into the holding page.

I got the Are You Human check and then got in.

Android tablet.

[pixelgeek]

Just checked, Still in a loop. Been like this for a couple of hours now.

Do you have 3rd party cookies disabled?

[has.been]

Well done Joe. Keep up the good work!

Andrew
BeneathALeadMountain

Plus one to that.

[ced1106]

Last night (around 3 am onwards), we got bot crawled again by a new set using "Yandex".

Just curious, but what's Yandex? All I found about Yandex was a Russian company. Are there many regular users here from Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex

[boneio]

Yandex is a legitimate Russian search engine crawler. It does tend to be a little aggressive.

Under attack mode is usually overkill, applying targeted rules to slow down certain bot categories, and making sure the botbot fight mode is on, plus the usual OWASP ruleset, should be sufficient for most purposes.

Its slightly trickier for LAF as traffic is presumably genuinely international. I have seen some illegitimate traffic from specific countries on my projects, and can often just block the whole country safely.
In this case, perhaps applying throttling over a certain threshold for certain countries might work instead.

Aside from all that, I've been getting the DNS parking page intermittently again for LAF...

[Ben Waterhouse]

This am still couldn't get in on Safari on my iPad, so I went in on DuckDuckGo, that worked for a couple of hours, then now that's stopped working. Only access now on Edge on my PC.

This is becoming a proverbial pain.

Ben

[zemjw]

It was unavailable again this morning UK time on my work machine, but it's back for now

Maybe we need to adopt the Magrathean approach to unwelcome visitors. A friendly "thanks for your interest" followed by a couple of nukes if they don't take the hint. Sadly, "oh no, not again" was all too appropriate this morning

Thanks to the support folks for fighting them off, again

[WargamesIllustrated]

Yandex is a legitimate Russian search engine crawler. It does tend to be a little aggressive.

Under attack mode is usually overkill, applying targeted rules to slow down certain bot categories, and making sure the botbot fight mode is on, plus the usual OWASP ruleset, should be sufficient for most purposes.

Its slightly trickier for LAF as traffic is presumably genuinely international. I have seen some illegitimate traffic from specific countries on my projects, and can often just block the whole country safely.
In this case, perhaps applying throttling over a certain threshold for certain countries might work instead.

Aside from all that, I've been getting the DNS parking page intermittently again for LAF...

Hi again, all,

I've gone ahead and disabled the "Under attack" mode with Cloudflare to make it less annoying for you to use the forum. I've hardened security using caching rules (so that Cloudflare takes pressure off the origin server), added rate limiting, certain countries have to pass a JS check, and I've added clamps on hot paths such as the login and search pages. I'll keep monitoring but so far, the origin is not serving as much which is great! I'll keep you posted!

Cheers,
Joe

[boneio]

Thanks Joe, it's certainly been reliable so far this afternoon 

Gotta get my LAF fix into my veins 

[Cubs]

Been happening to me again, Monday 25th and Wednesday 27th.

[Doug ex-em4]

Thanks for the work in keeping things working and thanks for the explanations which I find riveting and entirely incomprehensible…

Doug

[bluewillow]

Unrelated to LAF but I have noticed quite a few sites I frequent now showing the same captcha validation page as here, where previously there had been nothing of the sort. Someone mentioned the lots of sites are currently facing massing strain from the amount of bot accounts viewing them to scrape content, so is this a widely rolled out defense against that?

Correct, the Wargamers forum (effectively 20mm forum) were being hit by 130000 hits per day, wrecking our bandwidth, so the catchpa was added to get it back under 10000

[Moriarty]

Similar problem with my iPad and Mac desktop. But not if I Google ‘lead adventure forum’. Have now added LAF to Favourites on iPad and it seems to work.

[Tactalvanic]

had no access to the site for basically a day, but not sure which now as been working pretty much solid day/night this week

But simply had parking page and no access.

Not sure if was getting the more messed up because of no LAF fix, coffee, work stress etc. had some sleep this morning so improved slightly 

Even more so as LAF works. Thanks for dealing with it

[Rick]

Looks like it's happening again? 'LAF Under Siege: part 2' - at least we know what's happening (I think).