The Forum is under attack

Hey folks putting this out there The Forum has been down but should be back in a few hours blame Japan they have been flooding the forum for the last month and today alone 454,000 hits and for the month the forum had 1,313,743 hits and most of them are from Japan. So I have had to add a firewall to the forum for a year to block out these bots and my host says alot of them are AI Bots but the stats I posted are all from Japan. So hang tight we will be back to normal soon Our hosting is not ment for 1900 people online at one time today their have been as many as 1955 hits at one time. So this firewall cost me another $167.88 to block botsI see now at 1:00 AM the forum is back to normal with 100 users online Hope the firewall work the tech from our host says they have been adding them to many accounts this month Just because of the AI bots learning.

Well tech support services have finished with the upgrades to the forums security work so now most if not all bots will be filtered out as you can see now the users numbers are back to normal and while they were adding the new firewall to our site they did a bunce of other work and now the forum is running great. If you see anything thats not working right please let me know so I can get it fixed

Thanks
Glen

our web host is working on our server so there may be times when the forum can't be reached. They are working on a problem of AI bots attacking web site and most of them come out of Japan. So hang in there

our web host is working on our server so there may be times when the forum can't be reached. They are working on a problem of AI bots attacking web site and most of them come out of Japan. So hang in there

Update from host

I also saw your site is struggling to load at this time, and returning a mix of 503 and 502  responses, and it's clear from your cPanel resource usage that your hosting plan is over extended at this time :

Checking your site traffic for the past few hours, I can see why as you're receiving a very high rate of traffic,

but breaking this down to the top 20 IPs it appears clear that your site is under a DDOS as while we're seeing ~140K requests in the last couple of hours, the top IP has only had 57 requests in that time.

So the attack is being distributed across thousands of unique IPs.

Therefore I have enabled Emergency DDOS protection to help block the distributed bot attack and I see your server has now stabilized and your site is loading again:

You would think an AI botnet would have higher value targets than the Forum. If they're just attacking everything indiscriminately, the whole Internet is going to have problems pretty soon.

This whole AI thing is going to ultimately cause a lot of problem, IMHO.  I tend to call it AUI (artificial un intellegence).  Google has AI enabled and you can't get rid of it.  Kinda same thing with Facebook. 

Hi GlenS!

I'm sure you're probably already aware. But I've been getting 503 all day. Just letting you know, in case you don't see it for some reason.



Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

ya I am tring to deal with it. its very hard to get things across to someone that really can't speak english

For now the Forum is running at normal. I know when it is not running at normal I have alerts setup but Thanks everyone that let me know it wasn't running at peek But I knew long before anyone else knew

Thanks
Glen

Ok as far as we know the problem has been fixed. They found that the firewall that was installed to keep out all the AI bots was in fact fighting with the forum software. The forum wants to do a revers lookup on each person joining well when your behind a firewall that gices everyone cloud Ip address's and we could have 10 -15 people with the same Ip address and then the forum software is sitting there scraching it's head and saying how can this be and going around and around in a loop tring to figure out who is who and causeing the forum to use up it's resources and the fix was easy to do in the SMF software setting all i need to do was turn off hostname lookups and now we should be good to go. At the time of this post the forum has settled down and the Number of Processes used is down to 6 from 115 which is the max for the hosting plan so we will see how things go but things should be good from now on.

Thanks for understanding
Glen