Iceinspace timing out at times

[Nikolas]

I'm finding the forums flaky today

Timing out etc.

Anyone else experiencing this or is it a localized issue with my work server?

[Dave882]

Very slow for me yesterday. Bit better today but still slower than normal

[RB]

Same here.
Thought it was just me.

:shrug:

[sheeny]

At one stage yesterday the site wouldn't come up at all for me.


Al.

[Leo.G]

It's been very slow for 2 days for me, constant time outs, failed image attachments. Very slow to load.
I normally clear cookies but it hasn't helped because it's not a me problem for a change.

[N1]

Same for me.

Apparently IIS, threatened by shutdown mere months ago, set a new all-time user record last Friday, and right now there are nearly 10,000 active users as per the stats at the bottom.

- Oh wait, that was 10 minutes ago. Now it's only 8,000 -

Yeah, right.

[N1]

Mike's Lounge Room now hosting 11,000 people. The other 50 thousand are out on the deck for some solar observing presumably.

[RB]

Last Friday may have been due to the lunar eclipse. :shrug:

Most of those ‘users’ are bots/crawlers.

We basically have the usual/core members online at any one time.

RB

[leon]

I see Andrew now i get it, ;)I was here a couple of days ago and i did look who was on line here and it was an enormous amount of members. looking at all subjects and it was only 5am :shrug: I thought gee there are a lot of people up early like me. :lol::lol:

Leon :thumbsup:

[Leo.G]

It's considerably faster now.
These bots are a major nuisance everywhere but Google have to train their AI so the semi-robotic mob can use Chat whatever it's called.


I was recently insulted when I was asked by a smart fellow (local chemist friend) 10 years younger if I learnt some of the things I do by watching YouTouch-my-stuff-without-Ads-and-watch-out, sorry, YouTub.
I was highly insulted, a lot of what I know I studied long before there was even a thing called the internet and the thought of having a computer in everyone's pocket, NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!
The near local airport (Bathurst) may just about be large enough for a computer, MAYBE....... We're going to have to shrink those components, maybe 8" magnetic medium floppy discs thingies will work.....

[alpal]

Yes - there are far too many robot guests -
sometimes I can't load any page on this site.

[Crater101]

I've been experiencing the timeouts a bit lately, sometimes every time I load a new page I have to log in again. Seems to depend on the time of day, for me anyway. It's more frequent in the hours between 0600 and 0800.

[Nikolas]

Seems to be fine today, anyway of booting the bots?

[alpal]

Admin should be able to do it by tweaking the firewall.

It's still very slow at times today.

[OzEclipse]

Bot's roam forums at frequent intervals to keep the search engine results updated. I moderate on a different astro forum. In my portfolio area, I can see logs that record when the bots visit my sub forum. It's quite frequent, Google/ Microsoft Bots are most frequent.

Joe

[alpal]

But this looks like a DOS attack - 1000s of bots.
A good firewall will allow the Admin to block certain types of IP addresses.
The main culprits may have parts of their IP addresses in common e.g.
all from Russia or China etc.

[Mosc_007]

It's quite bad ATM.

25872 (12 members and 25860 guests)


Charles

[DarkArts]

We're not the only site experiencing a problem - new AI bots have a voracious appetite for info. But, apparently, at least some of them can be blocked:

AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites (https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/18/ai_crawlers_sourcehut/)

[joshman]

It's been atrocious this morning. currently "36,000" guests online.


New record of 37k+ users set this morning.

[Leo.G]

Still the same and timing out.

[ColHut]

Same here, maddening.

[alpal]

Right now

19 members and 34569 guests

[kvmx]

Man the servers are getting hammered at the moment, after waiting a minute just to load this second page I got timed out trying to navigate to the first page :lol:

[Wilso]

Yep it’s been to the point it’s unusable now, I normally browse a couple times a day during break times. Can’t do that if the page / server doesn’t respond!

[atalas]

No way this many visitors.....got to be a bot attack!

[DarkArts]

Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries (https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/)

[astronobob]

Must say I have been experiencing the same over the last couple weeks, But tonight it has been flawless ?

[kvmx]

I haven't experienced any timeouts for the last couple days. Knock on wood! :lol: