So it looks like the server is being hammered by bots or something constantly crawling old content which is maxing out the CPU and causing the service to continually fall over. I've added something called cloudflare in front of the servers which should help block this and do some caching to try and speed things up. It seems to be getting some of the traffic now so, hopefully, things will improve over the next 24 hours. You may get some prompts to try and help it work out if you are a real person. Any issue let me know. Any updates I'll stick them in this Facebook group as well https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1653958974902520&tsid=0.3205582518783081&source=typeahead
Simple solution, wipe the board and start again, them pesky little bots won't stand a chance, bit like my dads answer to head lice, nit shampoo for all the house and all three lads number one all over so we didn't bring um back from school again.
FYI Earlier this afternoon Cloudflair reported successful connection to Milan (I was connecting from Italy but not using VPN) when it timed out error 505? I think) but also reported (helpfully!!) host server was unresponsive or slow to respond . Certainly confirms (not that you needed it ) that the server was handling too much traffic. HTH
could you not do summat like this now I am now IT technocrat, but just a thought. If everyone had to log on for every session and go through one of those number ID things or a gridded photo and asked to click on the squares that contained certain items. They are used on many places to stop 'bots' I am sure you know what I mean Gally. But would that be practical? I for one would have no qualms in going through summat like that each time if it meant having a faster and more stable BBS. Lets face it the process would not take long would it , to log on in such a way I mean.
Re: could you not do summat like this It would mean that nobody would be able to see the forum at all without logging on. I think it would solve the issue (even without the captcha thing) but would severely lower visitor numbers too because the casual reader wouldn't be willing to sign in each and every time simply to see if anything new had been written.
good point ST as I said I am no IT Technocrat. I was just trying to help. Never thought it would keep away the casuals. BTW do the casuals have any affect on stability and speed ??
Re: good point ST I have no idea of the figures or anything but they will have an affect yes but in the grand scheme of things it shouldn't be any more than any other forum on the net so it shouldn't cripple the site. In fact people like you and me shouldn't even notice the effect. The bots that crawl the site are for things like Google so that they can list the individual pages in their search results but they are 'crawling' (visiting each page or after another) every single page on the site including the thousands of pages in the archive. Which as you can imagine is a big drain. Think of it as a builder coming out to look at the wall on your house to check that it is ok. Not such a problem until he starts checking each brick one at a time and each grain of sand in the mortar, the his mate comes behind him and starts doing the same etc.
Bloody hell I wondered what all those blokes in hard hats and dayglow vests were up to in my loft.... I only asked for a loft ladder quote.
Hi Gally, Just to report: over the last 24-48 hours I haven't been able to get onto the BBS. Just timeouts on the server after a while trying. My set up is as follows in case it matters: iMac and Firefox, or, iPad and Safari. (I also tried via iMac and Chrome.) I last tried around 7.00am this morning, but still couldn't get on. Just now, everything has loaded perfectly first time on the iPad Best wishes, and btw like many others I really value the BBS and the team behind it - thankyou for the time you put in.
Checks for / downloads. RSS feeds from the official site every 30 mins. Doubt it's causing the site to lock up.
For some reason DusThaNolll seems to be disliking stuff I post. I have a dislike for the other post on this thread confirming that I was having issues too. Strange guy!
Well it means it's serving some of the traffic If it's doing its job it should help reduce the stress on the server and we shouldn't see that. May take some time for the dns changes to kick in though
Fair enough. I've just had the other error which didn't mention cloudlfare, not trying to bug you just letting you know. Now put up some kind of donation button on here so we can at least give you some of your running costs back