Forum slowness and downtimes

[admin]

You might have noticed a severe forum slowdown in the past weeks. The reason for this is that the forum is being constantly hammered by bots which slows down everything and often leads to HTTP 503 errors. Unfortunately, they all use different IP addresses which makes it difficult to block them. Since all of them seem to come from South America the easiest thing would be the simply geoblock South America altogether but unfortunately, my webhoster doesn't have Apache's GeoIP module installed, presumably because they want to sell their own geoblocking solution for €20/month but I'm relucant to spend this money because it feels like a rip off because such things could be easily done through Apache if only GeoIP was installed...

So I'm currently experimenting with blocklists of malicious IP addresses but so far this hasn't improved things much because the site is still seeing a very high amount of traffic and thus becomes very slow. So don't be surprised if the site is continuing to be slow or shows HTTP 503. I'll try to get this resolved somehow. I might also have to take it down completely temporarily to try out some things to get rid of those bots. I just wanted to let you know that I'm aware of the problem...

[airsoftsoftwair]

This problem should be fixed now. Visitor numbers are back to normal (i.e. 30 to 50 visitors or so). Compare that to 5541 visitors one week ago...