Fyi- Working through some server issues today (had a brief outage)

[Sean]

Hi All,

We had a series of issues today with bots, which seems to have made our server virus scanning tools go haywire, grinding everything to a halt. Things are stable for now and I am waiting to hear back from the host on a plan to prevent this from happening again.

More soon.

Thanks,
Sean

 

[mshchem]

I wondered. Darn bots!!

 

[pentaxuser]

Logged-on about 5-10 mins ago and it is running very slowly with "blips" I started this reply and it then just took me elsewhere so had to re-type, Getting 2-3 inch black lines along top after I press reply as well

pentaxuser

 

[Sean]

Logged-on about 5-10 mins ago and it is running very slowly with "blips" I started this reply and it then just took me elsewhere so had to re-type, Getting 2-3 inch black lines along top after I press reply as well

pentaxuser

It should be ok at the moment. A common pattern is our user online count in the header goes through the roof:

currently: Online: 8,048

Then it hits 30,000 40 or even 50,000 and our load can't handle it. We have some monitoring running now to hopefully catch it in the act and get more data.

 

[logan2z]

I experienced this same issue with a non-photography site that I administer. I ended up using the free tier of the Cloudflare service to protect the site. It works very well, but users are often required to click an 'I'm not a bot' checkbox in order to access the site. It's been a small price to pay in order to keep the site running smoothly.

 

[Sean]

I experienced this same issue with a non-photography site that I administer. I ended up using the free tier of the Cloudflare service to protect the site. It works very well, but users are often required to click an 'I'm not a bot' checkbox in order to access the site. It's been a small price to pay in order to keep the site running smoothly.

It might come to that, but the last time I tried cloudflare it got quite irritating by hitting people with false positives. Some clicked "I am not a robot" once and done, some were getting hit several times a session. I'm not sure it plays very nice with web forums (but maybe it has improved). There was also a recent cloudflare outage that took out a large portion of the internet.

I am hoping for some affordable server side AI based monitoring that can detect anomalies in real time and mitigate them on the spot, then send you a report.

I'll definitely spend the next few days investigating some options.

 

[logan2z]

It might come to that, but the last time I tried cloudflare it got quite irritating by hitting people with false positives. Some clicked "I am not a robot" once and done, some were getting hit several times a session. I'm not sure it plays very nice with web forums (but maybe it has improved). There was also a recent cloudflare outage that took out a large portion of the internet.

I am hoping for some affordable server side AI based monitoring that can detect anomalies in real time and mitigate them on the spot, then send you a report.

I'll definitely spend the next few days investigating some options.

Good luck. Post back if you find a good, affordable alternative to Cloudflare.