Forum broken? & 503-504 ERRORS

[TysonLPrice]

I had just posted this:

Much, much better for me...

and it timed out

[2kaud]

504 is back as of a few minuts ago

As of now

Yeah - just had a 504. And when it is working it is very, very sluggish.....

[jpbro]

~30,000 users online again. If it's AI bots, then as a first measure the site should try asking them nicely to go away in the robots.txt file. Right now vbforums.com has no robots.txt file.

Admins, if you are out there, here's a decent place to start: https://robotstxt.com/ai

[Steve R Jones]

I haven't gotten any errors in the last 30 minutes or so.

[Eduardo-]

~30,000 users online again. If it's AI bots, then as a first measure the site should try asking them nicely to go away in the robots.txt file. Right now vbforums.com has no robots.txt file.

Admins, if you are out there, here's a decent place to start: https://robotstxt.com/ai

It is unbelievable that the forum doesn't have a robots.txt file. That's one of the very basic things that any webmaster knows (even amateurs).

[jpbro]

It is unbelievable that the forum doesn't have a robots.txt file. That's one of the very basic things that any webmaster knows (even amateurs).

It surprised me too. I expected to see an old robots.txt file without any of the new AI bots listed, not a 404 Not Found error.

[Steve R Jones]

I checked four of our sister sites and they all had a robots.txt file... They also were getting the errors.

VBF, do it's size is used as a Guinea pig. So the IT Guys were/are probably doing something.....

[Eduardo-]

You can even put a robots.txt to disallow all bots, but that would not be good because you would prevent Google and other search engines from indexing the site.

[Eduardo-]

Usually agents tell you what agents they are in the web petition headers.

It should be possible to investigate what these 38,000 or 25,000 or whatever high number of guests are.
How they identify themselves in the petitions, what are their IP addresses from, etc.
My guess is that they might be only a few hungry spiders. But the question is, once they already downloaded the whole site why they keep downloading the site over and over again? There aren't so many new pages every day.

It should be possible to put them in the robots.txt filter, and if they don't obey it, then block them.

[wes4dbt]

Glad to see the number of users back down and the site is performing well.

[Steve R Jones]

I saw this error several times this morning and am wondering if anyone else has seen it too:

This page isn’t working
If the problem continues, contact the site owner.
HTTP ERROR 429
------------------------

HTTP Error 429, also known as "Too Many Requests," is a client error response status code indicating that the client has sent too many requests in a given amount of time. This mechanism, commonly referred to as rate limiting, is used to control the rate at which requests are made to a server.

I have a feeling it's part of the solution that out IT Guys have enabled.

[wes4dbt]

Haven't seen it.

[Zvoni]

Haven't seen it.

Me, neither.
On the contrary: Quite snappy today as of right now

[Steve R Jones]

It's probably just me... I couldn't recreate it here... But when I go from here to a sister site and clock on a few things including getting into the Admin CP, it shuts me down. And I can't visit any other sister site... Until about 30 to 60 seconds then I'm clear.

[Zvoni]

Whatever the Tech-Guys did: Thank you. Kudos!

[Steve R Jones]

TEST...... Testing MEM issue not displaying threads and posts.

[Zvoni]

TEST...... Testing MEM issue not displaying threads and posts.

Works again?

EDIT: looks like it

[2kaud]

I got another 504 error this morning........

[yereverluvinuncleber]

504 friends not found, byte timeout. Forum is broken for me now. Not usable anymore. Might as well be dead if this continues.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Shall we start a "spare" forum on a different location with alternative software, so we can at least share our despair and determine what is going on?

Perhaps it might be time to focus and set up a VBForum discord channel just for VB6 users, another for VB.NET &c. I know the TwinBasic users have it so perhaps it is time to move toward better technology...

[Arnoutdv]

The HTTP error 500 are gone.
Again 504 errors:
There are currently 43161 users online. 15 members and 43146 guests

Perhaps it might be time to focus and set up a VBForum discord channel just for VB6 users, another for VB.NET &c. I know the TwinBasic users have it so perhaps it is time to move toward better technology...

Are at least a discord channel to inform each other about the status of vbForums

[sapator]

We had issue at our companies , we cut down China and India users for a while and the now we have that stupid Azure and the attack are mostly from these countries. I've written that here on the first attack on the forum. I get that it's an international forum but I've only seen on person from these countries here. So a test "sacrifice" of the addresses for a day might reveal if this is the issue. Or, you know, continue DOSing.

[Steve R Jones]

The IT Guys are working hard on the site issues.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack

[Eduardo-]

The IT Guys are working hard on the site issues.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack

The intriguing question is, who could want to attack this forum?

MS?

[sapator]

Musk??
No it does not go that way. The don't give a rats banuka for the forum. So if I'm correct you have to to block those countries or we will be going like this for a while.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

https://www.**********.com/ - we ought to have a spare forum at f o r u m o t i o n so that we have somewhere to go during the frequent site outages we are now experiencing. A discord instance for the VB6 part of the forum would be most welcome. Is this not something the mods would be interesting in initiating?

PS. forum does not like the link - f o r u m o t i o n

[Steve R Jones]

Apparently Brazil wants to join us real badly. I say "off with their heads."

[2kaud]

The incantation being used by the gods isn't working any more. A new spell to repel is needed.

[TysonLPrice]

I've enjoyed this site for so many years...it took eight tries to try and post in . VB .NET

[Steve R Jones]

I've enjoyed this site for so many years...it took eight tries to try and post in . VB .NET

And now 12 hours later the site is screaming fast. The IT Guys will continue to monitor etc....

[Arnoutdv]

It’s fast now.
Only 8089 visitors, it has been a while since it was less than 20K

[sapator]

I got 503 errors all around .