OHW is under attack

[leggysman]

I don't want OHW to go away.

OHW will not go away . Not as long as I have anything to say about it.

I think this is a passing storm, and we'll adapt the site to handle this, and the next one.

When I returned home tonight the bot storm was at an intensity I don't think we've seen to date. Even with restarting services, I couldn't coax a single page load from the board. But, shutting it down for a few minutes might have helped (alternatively, it all just stopped) and things seem good now. 83K bots currently blocked. I'll keep that list intact for at least the next 24 hours.

Anyway, the AI companies will mostly go tits-up soon, and the founders will cash out just before that happens, leaving the retail investors and retirement funds holding the bag. The stock market will implode, and AI will leave a smoking, rubble-filled crater in our economy. All of us who aren't corrupt politicians and billionaires will suffer for a time, but the AI technology that's been developed will continue to be useful to people willing and able to pay for it, and the world will move on. On to the next hype cycle from the tech and business bros. They keep screwing us over, and we never learn. Such is modern life.

[dnic]

Thankyou leggysman for you dedication and effort in this battle.

OHW has been such a good place for so long. Having its roots in the new technology of the world wide web back in the day, when it was all new, free and all possibilities. It would be a same to see it consumed by AI and "modern life"

Thanks again for all you have done and continue to do!

It does seem to have gotten better in the last 36-48 hrs

[leggysman]

Thankyou leggysman for you dedication and effort in this battle.

It is my pleasure.

It does seem to have gotten better in the last 36-48 hrs

Leaving the bot blocker running with a full list of visitors and denied bots was a good call (yay, me! Nice to get a win!). The program currently 'knows' 423K visitors and is blocking 100K+ of them. They're hitting us hard right now, but we seem to be keeping our heads above water.

I fear what will happen when I have to restart the blocker, though. Everything it 'knows' will be forgotten, and I fear we'll have a bad night, that night.

I'm going to code up something so that it saves everything going forward, so when I restart it, it can just pick up where it left off.

[hornedhubby]

Great to have you on our side!

Best wishes.

[BeingInTheWorld]

I received a 405 error a few days ago (almost unheard of for an end-user to get these), instructing me to directly email leggysman or leggysandy (forget which) at gmail.com because my IP was banned. NOPE.

Service was soon restored. I appreciate all you do.

[Littledicky]

I am a fairly new member on this fabulous forum. I can't offer any advice as I have no IT experience, but I would like to express my gratitude to leggysman and others trying to resolve this problem on our behalf. I do have the occasional problems logging in but a refresh or reload usually resolves my issue. Thanks to all and good luck.

[leggysman]

Thanks guys.

We had a good night last night, I think. I managed to get the cache (suggested by ferrisandrews) working for non-logged-in clients (i.e. mostly bots) so they aren't hitting our database with every request, and the site has been pretty snappy since.

I don't know whether the bots took a break last night, or whether the 238K IPs my software is blocking is making a significant difference, but the nightly surge didn't seem to happen last night - at least not while I was watching.

[leggysman]

We're getting hit really badly again today. Again it's a vast number of bots from different IP addresses, but they're bypassing the cache by using the search function. Need a new solution for that.

[troilusand]

Thank you for all your efforts, Leg!

Troy

[Long Lurker 34]

LS
- Figured as much when I went to lurk this morning.
- Thanks for all the hard work.
- You'd figure whom ever is behind this would have much more targets of significance/

[leggysman]

We're trying out anubis.

If you briefly see a page showing a cartoon girl, before your page loads, that's our bot blocker at work. It challenges your browser to solve a math problem using javascript, which tends to be a problem for the dingbat bots.

Once that's done, your browser gets a cookie that lasts for several days, and you shouldn't see that screen again until the cookie expires / gets deleted or you switch devices.

As we speak I'm watching the number of "guest users" (mostly bots) drop by an order of magnitude. So I guess it's working.