RESOLVED: Bot Spam Knocking Board Offline

[Caesar]

This weekend, we've gone offline a number of times due to bot spam. Cloudflare is also getting knocked offline repeatedly so I can't presently enable that here. As such, I've had to be extremely manual in fighting the bot deluge.

What does that mean for you?

I've cut the session lengths from 3600 seconds (1 hour) to 600 seconds (10 minutes). This means you WILL BE LOGGED OUT AFTER 10 MINUTES OF INACTIVITY. If you are the type to type your updates directly into the forum, you should make use of the quick draft or save draft features and/or save your updates into a Google doc or Word Doc. I don't want to hear any whining when you lose an update because my priority is to keep the board up and I can't have 5,000 bots from India and Singapore sitting on the board for an hour.

I've re-enabled Block Holes for IPs. There is a chance you will receive a false positive and not be able to post. If this is the case, let me know.

I will let everyone know when the situation has resolved or I've enabled CloudFlare, whichever comes first.

EDIT: CloudFlare is now enabled. We shall wait to see if the situation resolves.

All measures necessary to fend off the bot attacks have been implemented and the board is now secure enough to handle what's left of what potentially gets through (To explain the situation we were facing, the board received more than 1.6M requests over the last 24 hours. Typically, we are in the tens of thousands over a day driven largely by the mChat refreshing for users actively chatting). Full functionality has been restored to the board.

If you experience any issues, reach out to me through PM if you are able to log in or email me at [email protected].

Thank you for your patience. Remember to vote in Chise Madness.

[Sonny]

This weekend, we've gone offline a number of times due to bot spam. Cloudflare is also getting knocked offline repeatedly so I can't presently enable that here. As such, I've had to be extremely manual in fighting the bot deluge.

What does that mean for you?

I've cut the session lengths from 3600 seconds (1 hour) to 600 seconds (10 minutes). This means you WILL BE LOGGED OUT AFTER 10 MINUTES OF INACTIVITY. If you are the type to type your updates directly into the forum, you should make use of the quick draft or save draft features and/or save your updates into a Google doc or Word Doc. I don't want to hear any whining when you lose an update because my priority is to keep the board up and I can't have 5,000 bots from India and Singapore sitting on the board for an hour.

I've re-enabled Block Holes for IPs. There is a chance you will receive a false positive and not be able to post. If this is the case, let me know.

I will let everyone know when the situation has resolved or I've enabled CloudFlare, whichever comes first.

Do whatever you have to do, mate. Thanks for your efforts.

[Soapy]

nothing can stop me from taking your belt fn

[YaBoyRobRoy]

Perfect timing, they just want to join in on the chise madness

[Bubba's Cruise]

that might be why i couldn't get logged in yesterday on the edge browser