Forum server settings changed

[xantia_v6]

Due to excessive server loading caused by some badly behaved 'bots' (automated content collectors), I have changed the anti-ddos settings on the site to be much more aggressive.

This has had the desired effect of reducing the server loading from 100% to about 10% (the other 90% was coming from just 8 IP addresses located in China).

There may however be some instances of the new settings causing some real users to be locked out of the site for a period of 5 minutes. I have not seen it happen yet, but if you think you are affected by this, then please reply here and I will attempt to tune the settings.

[mickthemaverick]

I had an outage yesterday Mike where I got the message 'The forum is offline for maintenance'. Lasted a short while but been fine since it came back on. Obviously I have no clue when but I believe it was mid afternoonish!!

[myglaren]

Same here but the forum continued to work anyway.

Has been slow intermittently but so have others, my hopeless broadband presumably.

[xantia_v6]

The outage yesterday was due to unrelated work that required the forum to be offline while I sorted out a database issue.

[Paul-R]

No problems for me.

So far...

[xantia_v6]

I have been keeping an eye on the server performance, and the every 5 minutes same addresses would flood the forum with requests for a few seconds before getting blocked again.

In the last hour they seem to have got bored and gone away.

[Rhothgar]

Not sure if it will work for you because it will depend on the host amongst other things.

But maybe worth entering CN into the cPanel. Block the whole country. We had to do that on our business website. Blocked RU also.