Recent board issues

I’ve been having trouble with the site lately with timeout and even some cryptic error about the site being out of resources.

I checked and I believe the database that stores the posts for this site doesn’t have size limitations, meaning our host (inmotion) isn’t limiting us to just 500MB of space or whatever. At least not that I am aware of.

I believe the issues are related to an unintentional DDoS “attack.” A few bad culprits trying to load page after page with milliseconds in between. The end result are these timeouts and the error message about the resources being limited.

I’ve seen several IPs in a range that is reserved for Singapore trying to access lots of pages. I’ve blocked a large range of IPs to hopefully dry up. It’s probably just people trying to scan the site for search engines. Even though those IPs are now blocked, they’re still trying to hit the site (and they’re getting denied). It may be a while before that traffic dries up.

Another culprit appears to be a bot (claudebot) that’s mining the site for data for AI. While I don’t mind AI leaning from things posted on the site, I do mind when their requests are so frequent that it brings the site down. I’ve made some efforts to block that bot. I’m not sure whether those efforts will prove successful.

If it is just a few services out there mining the site for search engines/AI hopefully those processes are now either blocked or will eventually run their course.