Help! Slow, not loading, freezing

Thanks for the reports, obviously several people had issues yesterday. As I said I have been working on it so I'm more interested how it is now.
 
Fine right now. Thanks for your time on this Chris, it must be incredibly frustrating.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Fine right now. Thanks for your time on this Chris, it must be incredibly frustrating.
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Stressful! and fitting it in around work and other things in life eats into my beauty sleep which god knows I need. I did a 17 hour non-stop day on Thursday because of this issue, was at it after 11 last night and from 7 this morning
 
sirch said:
Stressful! and fitting it in around work and other things in life eats into my beauty sleep which god knows I need. I did a 17 hour non-stop day on Thursday because of this issue, was at it after 11 last night and from 7 this morning
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Thank you for your efforts Chris (y)
 
sirch said:
Stressful! and fitting it in around work and other things in life eats into my beauty sleep which god knows I need. I did a 17 hour non-stop day on Thursday because of this issue, was at it after 11 last night and from 7 this morning
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Just to repeat others' comments - thanks for all the efforts; much appreciated. Helps keep me what passes for sane!
 
sirch said:
Stressful! and fitting it in around work and other things in life eats into my beauty sleep which god knows I need. I did a 17 hour non-stop day on Thursday because of this issue, was at it after 11 last night and from 7 this morning
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Sorry it's been a hassle and efforts are appreciated - wouldn't having someone else knowledgeable of the system(s) be a benefit?
 
Wow whats going on with the site, seemed down all last eve?
 
Fundamentally we are seeing a huge amount of bot traffic, peaking at around 6000 bot connections at times causing the site to grind to a halt.

That said it was definitely up yesterday evening and changes I made yesterday have dramatically improved the situation.
 
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You definitely need some kind of bot swatting device that gets rid of them. A no refresh within X seconds might curtail some of it but catch some of us that hit new posts a bit too often!
 
The site seems very slow this afternoon (22/5/2026). Up to 10 seconds to load a text (rather than image) based page. Other sites are as normal.
 
OK, must have been a local and temporary issue at my end!

Even picture heavy threads are now loading as expected.
 
Very sticky this evening

Bad gateway 502 several times
 
I had the same 15 minutes ago but ok now
 
same here, seems back to normal.
 
Back to normal for me too now.
 
A pain yesterday
Insufferable today

Slow to refresh Approx 30 secs same to load a page or move around the site
 
RyanB said:
Probably something to do with the 45,759 'guests' currently on the site. All AI agents I would suspect...:mad: Its pretty much a DoS attack from big tech
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Do we actually need 'guests'?
3. Restrict Unregistered Guest Access
AI bots largely browse as "guests" to scrape publicly accessible threads.
  • Require user login to view full threads or access multiple pages .
  • Restrict resource-heavy functions like forum searches and attachment downloads to registered members only.
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RyanB said:
Probably something to do with the 45,759 'guests' currently on the site. All AI agents I would suspect...:mad: Its pretty much a DoS attack from big tech
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Agreed.

If there were no other reasons for blocking AI sites, this would justify it on its own.
 
gramps said:
Do we actually need 'guests'?
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Wouldn't that mean the site could only be viewed as a registered member though? It would seriously impact genuine new members signing up if they couldn't see what they were signing up for. I know I sporadically browsed the site for a few months before I decided to actually join.
On another forum I used in the past if you weren't registered images were only viewable as thumbnails which would cut down on the data but I think this is more of a too many requests at the same time problem.

All supposition really as I'm no expert but if there's a way to automatically identify and block IP addresses these bots are using that would be ideal. I wouldn't be surprised if we already use something like that here but those clever AI bots/ companies find a way around it eventually. Maybe employ AI to block other AI, wouldn't that be neat solution.

The reality is the AI genie is out of the lamp and we really need effective legislation with stiff penalties to protect against the harms it is causing.
 
The bots are back in force. It was coping with 20,000 yesterday, but we're over 70,000 today.

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RyanB said:
Wouldn't that mean the site could only be viewed as a registered member though?
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  • Restrict resource-heavy functions like forum searches and attachment downloads to registered members only.
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  • :thinking:
 
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