Looks like gremlins are creeping back into this site.

Honest Abe

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Jan 18, 2013
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being a poster who felt a while ago that this site was suffering and needed to be put down and end its suffering, I have to now say that it has apparently seen the light and has been given renewed life. No issues observed here of late ..... yippee!
 

Ibrahim

Administrator
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So what happened was we were cruising just fine after the fixes I put in months ago, but then a couple of days ago a bot hit us (and Tractorbynet) pretty hard. Several automatic web-crawlers were using 100 connections up individually. And this happened about a dozen times. So while the server was able to 'recover' and try to keep serving web pages it was still hanging up on these 1200 requests that kept asking.

We put in some automatic blockers now. If anyone tries to take 20 simultaneous connections at once, they'll receive a temporary ban.

No users should be able to do that with their PCs or phones, it would take special tools. So no worries about accidentally being banned. However, if you notice any negative behavior about the site in the next week, please comment here or make a new thread or otherwise let us know. But fingers crossed we're good again.
 

StarTech

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Feb 19, 2020
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And you know why I hate spammers and bots so much. I tend to ban spammers permanently. I even had to do some IP groups blocks. If it has a email ending in .RU they are also banned from even setting up an account.
 

Ibrahim

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And you know why I hate spammers and bots so much. I tend to ban spammers permanently. I even had to do some IP groups blocks. If it has a email ending in .RU they are also banned from even setting up an account.
Yup. Unfortunately they'll just go on to another set of IPs. So that's why I'm hopeful the new setup will trigger properly and ban them when they misbehave. (Really, I have no problem with search engines browsing the site as long as they don't lock up all the resources for themselves.)
 
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