Forum slow?

[Syne]

Of course. Russian and Iran (and probably China as well) want to scrape Western sites for intel or to see how well their misinformation campaigns are working (considering all the foreign sources masquerading as Western citizens to skew our perception of public consensus).

Also, server load limit is keeping me from posting this. Took about ten attempts.

[C C]

Now it's 403 Forbidden. Imperial palace status. Though an intermittently familiar error from the past.

[stryder]

Now it's 403 Forbidden. Imperial palace status. Though an intermittently familiar error from the past.

Unfortunately due to the huge number of requests over the past week, I've had to drastically block entire IP ranges to reduce the abuse to manageable.
This has meant that some countries will likely not be able to access the forum (due to the 403), the problem of course is sometimes the IP ranges might stretch borders though various companies. Currently VPNs and Proxies might well feel the nip.

I'm hoping this is only a temporary solution to keep the forum up while I work in other methods of dealing with the abuse network responsible.

[C C]

Now it's 403 Forbidden. Imperial palace status. Though an intermittently familiar error from the past.

Unfortunately due to the huge number of requests over the past week, I've had to drastically block entire IP ranges to reduce the abuse to manageable.
This has meant that some countries will likely not be able to access the forum (due to the 403), the problem of course is sometimes the IP ranges might stretch borders though various companies.  Currently VPNs and Proxies might well feel the nip.

I'm hoping this is only a temporary solution to keep the forum up while I work in other methods of dealing with the abuse network responsible.

Seems to be okay, today, though that may be contingently due to me just missing the hectic periods.

[stryder]

Update:
I've made a slight change as just blocking entire ranges of IPs globally was extremely drastic. I do intend to try and whittle down as to which IP ranges need to be penalised for scraping, however for the time being I've rigged a change to match the method I currently have for dealing with older bots that were too active.

It's basically a flooding control that will only activate during site active periods. (Those periods are based upon observations of global activity as well as user activity.)
So it means the scrapers can sort of be active, but it will be hit or miss as to whether they window for access is available. It means humans caught behind the IP ranges can still access the site, although it will be intermittent (they'd have to message me or post to the forum to let me know if they are affected)

(I have to admit I prefer the "rawdog" method of site operations where I don't use third-party API's, so it limits what I can do as I'm not using Cloudflare, GeoIP etc which would of easily tackled the issue.)

Anyway we'll see if this curbs the site from hitting the resource/processor ceiling.

Further Update:
Looks like just a time period throttle isn't enough on its own. So I'm trying some small changes that I hope doesn't upset the membership.

You'll notice that when not logged in, you'll not see as many forums or the whosonline information. This has been done to reduce how much scrapers and unauthorised spiders have to access. Normal spiders that have been added to the list however will still be able to access the forum, so posts/threads can still be found for search engines.

I added a nonpost subforum that is only viewable (or should only be viewable) while not logged in. It's aimed at the bot/spider/scrapers and their owners. At least an attempt to point out that it's not okay to scrape abusively and that something will be done when they do. Not that it will make a blind bit of difference, but at least no one can say "We didn't know that!"

Anyway I'll continue to look to see what effective ways I have to cut the scraper abuse, as I really don't want to keep the IPs on the ban list considering just how many I've assigned to it currently.