Board Problems: "General Error"

[Searcher08]

Cloudflare for Forums and Blogs
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tips-using-cloudflare-for-your-for/

Should be a one minute task on Rackspace
https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/use-cloudflare-with-rackspace/

[Elvis]

DDoS attacks are illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Starting a DDoS attack against a network without permission is going to cost you up to 10 years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine.

[Searcher08]

Is there any way of getting this info to Jeff? AFAIK he is the only one with admin authority, but if he just asked them to set up DDOS protection on Cloudflare it should only take a few minutes.

[Elvis]

Is there any way of getting this info to Jeff? AFAIK he is the only one with admin authority, but if he just asked them to set up DDOS protection on Cloudflare it should only take a few minutes.

Searcher! Great to see you.

See here:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42001

For anyone who missed it, JackRiddler is an admin now, along with Jeff.

[cptmarginal]

DDoS attacks are illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Starting a DDoS attack against a network without permission is going to cost you up to 10 years in prison and up to a $500,000 fine.

Sorry, didn't mean to strongly imply that this problem really was caused by anything like that. It was just idle speculation, which is why I first said it was a half-assed DDoS if anything.

Should be a one minute task on Rackspace

CloudFlare is a pay service

Also, we don't know for sure that it would help anything. My first guess would be that we genuinely are seeing a huge spike in traffic.

I also realized just yesterday that it is perfectly logical that when the main page of the forum says, for example, that 360 users were browsing the forum in the last 5 minutes, General Discussion will say that only 30 are browsing right at that moment. Total over five minutes is of course much higher versus the number right that instant.

[Searcher08]

Cloudflare is free for up to five websites - I know because I set it up on my own sites a couple of months ago.
Does wonders for speed. Most shared hosts offer it.

After more reading, I suspect the problem is connected to mysql not releasing connections , so probably a mysql / Apache issue rather than huge demand. Used to run an alternative health Forum with Snitz software and an Access (!) database and 100 simultaneous users with great performance.

[cptmarginal]

Ah, OK. I was looking at the Pro plan. Don't mind me, I'm a dummy.

One way or another there has certainly been a lot more traffic recently. The record for the highest number of people online in a five minute period was doubled last month, to a previously unthinkable 758. The previous record was set in the early Trump admin days of 2017.

[Elvis]

Sorry, didn't mean to strongly imply that this problem really was caused by anything like that. It was just idle speculation, which is why I first said it was a half-assed DDoS if anything.

No worries! I wasn't responding to anything posted, just "letting it be known"; it's looking like it's an attack, and we have an idea who's doing it. Shit is fucked up all over and everybody's busy with shit, but the problem is being addressed if slowly.