Potential IP Blocks

[wserra]

If you look towards the bottom of the index page, you'll see the following:

Most users ever online was 4475 on Sun May 04, 2025 6:58 am

That was yesterday. Over the last couple of months, I've noticed from time to time we have 200 or more people online. We can handle a couple of hundred, but 4500 amounts to a DDoS attack - intentional or not.

Most of those people come through the same IP blocks. If I see this suspicious behavior going forward, I intend to block the offending IPs. If legit users try to log in from one of those IP blocks, they (of course) will not be able to do so. Hopefully that will not be the case. If it is, I suggest a VPN or an anonymizer such as Tor. Sorry for any inconvenience, but 4500 people will make the board unavailable to everyone.

[wserra]

As the site regulars will have seen, we went through what was almost certainly a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. I have an idea who was behind it, but can't be sure. It took a while to clear it up because there were issues getting into the hosting account. Those issues are now resolved. The attack, however, doesn't appear to be over. At one point this morning, we had over 3K sessions simultaneously. However, now that we're alerted to it, we're watching closely.

The solution involved blocking certain IPs. I can't be sure that there won't be any collateral damage - blocking legitimate users. Hopefully not. If so, try the solutions above.

[wserra]

Occasionally the board throws "Too Many Requests" errors. If you get one, you can try whatever you were doing again immediately, and it should work.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on - I'm a lawyer, not IT - but it would make sense that they are caused by bots still trying to flood the board but being denied by the IP blocks. If you are trying to submit a post you've written, I suggest you copy it to the clipboard first, so you don't lose it if the board hiccups.