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[LenR]

Slow today - had to make 2 attempts to reply to a thread 0930 MST
What are other members experiencing.....

[Geoff F]

Timed out on several occasions recently but better now, although still slow.

[LenR]

Absolutely dismal for the last couple of days!

[connectinfosoft]

Slow today - had to make 2 attempts to reply to a thread 0930 MST
What are other members experiencing.....

Very very slow here when I try to post or reply every time get down

[Manfred M]

I contacted Sean earlier this week. The problem appears to lie with the company hosting the site and he was going to raise a maintenance ticket with them to resolve the speed / response time issue.

[LenR]

Cheers Manfred, let's hope this issue can be resolved.....

[Manfred M]

Here are the latest updates from Sean:

Hi Manfred,

We are still working on it but it appears like the website is being HEAVILY crawled by AI bots, which are slowing everything down. That's understandable given the large amount of original educational content, etc., but is unfortunate for performance. The last few times this happened the bots moved on and speed was restored, but it can take several days to a week which is too long.

Next step is to find a good traffic throttling tool specifically to handle these bots...

Thanks,
Sean


It should be a little better now, we have blocked the problematic IP ranges and changed the database type for efficiency.

[Manfred M]

Message from Sean received today:

"Yes, the changes made a short-term improvement but either the bot changed IP range or there were new bots. The next plan of defense is using something like Cloudflare..."

[Geoff F]

A UK wildlife site which I regularly use has Cloudflare to check that connections are coming from real people. It seems to work well.

[DanK]

Today it seems to be functioning. For a number of days, it was completely unusable from here, as bad as it has ever been. I usually timed out while trying to access pages and always timed out when trying to post. I'll try posting some images now.

[LenR]

Agreed......

[Geoff F]

I keep getting timed out today. I can access the site but signing in is as far as I get.