Strange cookie requests.

[Josh the Cyborg]

For me the site is just generally slow

[Elana]

Okay, quick update on the issue.
As should be obvious my idea to prevent it from happening at all, did not work

But by now instead of a million of bots constantly hitting the page it is now only (depending on the day) between 1 to 4 thousand,

Unfortunately even a lousy 1000 bots constantly reloading the page can be a lot of unnecessary stress and can lcause thise server to become unreachable for a few seconds.
(and every time that happens you get the other evil page instead)

[Hand-Holder]

Whatever it is, I Love this community and that is the only thing keeping me here, because each 10 clicks to do whatever I do in this forum, 6 of them are that annoying page, not exaggerating a single bit, either opening a page, checking a post, answering someone, no matter what I´m doing, as long as my mouse clicks, is 6 out of 10 that page, is beyond annoying, If I didn´t love you guys so much, it would be too unbearable, I swear to my mothers health, is 6 clicks out of 10 I go to that page... I see that page more times than I see this board !!! I know you are worried Elana and trying to fix it, Im just letting you know how bad it is !!!

[Hand-Holder]

Whatever it is, I Love this community and that is the only thing keeping me here, because each 10 clicks to do whatever I do in this forum, 6 of them are that annoying page, not exaggerating a single bit, either opening a page, checking a post, answering someone, no matter what I´m doing, as long as my mouse clicks, is 6 out of 10 that page, is beyond annoying, If I didn´t love you guys so much, it would be too unbearable, I swear to my mothers health, is 6 clicks out of 10 I go to that page... I see that page more times than I see this board !!! I know you are worried Elana and trying to fix it, Im just letting you know how bad it is !!!

PS - AND GUESS WHERE I WENT when I hit SUBMIT on this post ??? TO THAT PAGE !!!

[eddiegiantman]

Yeah I think it's time to get outta here and set up shop somewhere else. It feels like this place is just gonna be botted to hell.

[squelch]

Maybe putting the site behind Cloudflare would mitigate some of the issue?

[Elana]

Funnily enough, I already tried that
But as most content is dynamic it just means I lose a proper access statistic, but around 95% of the load is still there.

The next steps will unfortunately include throwing money at the problem.
Hopefully something relatively simple, as cloudflares added bot protection will suffice

[ensmallen]

Thought the board was a goner for a while then suddenly things got much better. All in one morning, hope this holds.

[Elana]

But the web statistic says I lost 90% of my visitors, how will the site ever cope with that

[Hand-Holder]

I don´t wanna JINX my most recent clean experience, but the problem seams to have vanished

Yesterday I used the board for many stuff and in some 200 clicks I only got that once... Today is going the same way, not cookie page at all...

[Elana]

You are lucky.
My own experience cloudflare worked like a charm for around 24 hours after the pro upgrade and then the bots adapted.

Okay cloudflare seems to block maybe half the bots, so the board hovers now at the brink of collapse instead of being dead all the time.


For now all I can do is wait some time and see how the numbers develop, to figure out what the next step should be.
(Yes, I have still some ideas, but as all ideas that are left have money involved, I can't just try them all on random and hope for the best)

[Hand-Holder]

YEAPS, I spoke too soon, here it comes again, less frequent but clearly REGULARRRRRRRRRRRRRR