Folks, there's some dumb bullshit going on with fucking AI spiders and shit basically screwing up the message board by descending on it in droves and causing "too many connection" problems. You may have noticed.

Until I get a better handle on it, I'm just gonna tell you to go to the forum URL ending in a BB3 and delete the "3". I'll let you know when things will work "normal" again.

_________________

It's generally good to know when someone else notices such things, and yes, I did. Good luck!


Yes...

_________________
'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

EGB Fan's EGB Fans
EGB Fan on FFN and AO3

Lol...I'm assured that at least one person was still able to get here.

It's just insane. I mean, look at the bottom of the board now:
Yesterday it was showing like six or seven hundred guests.

I did ban some bots with .htaccess files a couple weeks ago, and it seemed to help for a while, but it started fucking up again. Let's see how long this lasts.

_________________

Testing something at the usual URL...


Still shows 194 guests and slow to post.

Keep tinkering...

_________________

Damn...jumped up to about 1200 just when I was posting. Back to /phpBB/

_________________

Just tried something different.

Same fucking results.

As if I didn't already hate AI...

_________________

I've got one more thing I can think of to try, but I don't like it: I may have to restrict the board to registered users only, and remove permissions for guests and bots to see anything.

I'll probably wait until the weekend to try it.

_________________

If you're here right now, you've noticed that I've made the board readable only by registered users. I'm down to about 300 "guests" and bots at this moment, which is probably still too much, so we'll see how it goes.

_________________

...And that didn't seem to help for very long. Sigh.

This sucks. This sucks hard.

_________________

So everything's back to the way it's been for the last few weeks. Guests can see the board again.

I've run out of ideas that don't involve sending money to GoDaddy or Cloudflare or something.

_________________

How frustrating it must all be for you, Fritz! But this set-up works for me, at least, and maybe one day the AI bots will find something better to do. Although, come to think of it, that can't be a good thing...

_________________
'Extreme Ghostbusters was the best-written show, because it wasn't just about the ghostbusting, it was about the characters.' - Rino Romano

EGB Fan's EGB Fans
EGB Fan on FFN and AO3

It's been weeks. Let's see how long this lasts.

_________________

Twelve hours with no apparent connection problems, guest count still down in the double digits...fingers crossed.

_________________

(sigh) And now we're back in the triple digits. Probably moving back to the other url if it keeps up or gets worse.

_________________

Few more days of observations:

I've come to the site a couple times in the mornings with triple digit visitor stats. But it seems more often than not it's down in the low double digits, like between 10-20, which is probably the most expected result.

Maybe some of the stuff I did with .htaccess and robots.txt started to work better after I basically chased the bots away for a few weeks by moving the board?

Will continue to monitor.

_________________