^ Same for me.

I wasn't able to view Buzzjack without logging in just now. Has that happened to anyone else today?

I wasn't able to view Buzzjack without logging in just now. Has that happened to anyone else today?

 

Someone changed the rules to make that happen. We suspected that the unusually high number of guests was causing the issue. It seems to have rectified it for now.

Yup I changed that in the hope it'll reduce the number of guests viewing

We're down to 1375 guests now after peaking over 1800 so it seems like it might have worked, unless it's just coincidentally dropping now anyway.

There must be a thread somewhere that they’re targeting.

 

I remember we had like thousands of guests viewing the TV Forum Index years ago which slowed down the site and meant the thread has stayed quarantined in the Entertainment Mod Forum. RIP :(

 

The TV Forum Index has almost 750,000 views :lol:

I think the cursed thread is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - over 100,000 total views and 150 guests currently viewing

 

Probably more people than have seen the actual film :o

and a whole 4 replies, it must be that thread

It's now in the entertainment mod lounge, I'll leave Buzzjack guest-only for a day or so just to monitor the situation though. Things seem to be working normally for me currently anyway!

Still getting a variable few seconds of lag but that feels instant compared to how it was for a couple of hours earlier, I will not take this for granted :')

Yes it is a noticeable improvement. We're currently at 1417 guests, I suppose they are being counted even if they're stuck on the login page? :thinking:

Back up to over 1500 guests and the site has slowed down considerably again.

Back up to over 1500 guests and the site has slowed down considerably again.

 

Wow that's a lot of guests :lol: must be eager to register :magic:

It's not any worse for me since my last post in this thread!

It still takes a bit of time to load the pages, it should be pretty instant though, so there must be an issue somewhere. I do find it a bit straining at times, and it was pretty awful earlier around between 5 pm to 6 pm ish

It's about at the level it's been this weekend for me, slower than it should be but a lot better than earlier.

 

Not sure there's anything more I can do, it's up to Phil now!

If the guests are mostly bots then I imagine from my limited knowledge that they are programmed to keep refreshing pages so that they don’t get kicked off the forum and forced to sign up. I think it’s still possible to view what pages guests are clicking on by viewing the online list, but the fact the numbers have stayed over 1,000 for a long time is still concerning. I’m not sure what it was a year ago, maybe the Wayback Machine can tell us for example this time last year;

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20221003081613/...ack.com/forums/

 

A snapshot from September 2022 suggests just over 200 guests online.

 

 

2021 has a similar figure for this time of year just over 200 and I imagine it’s a recurring theme for many years prior too.

Had a look at what they were looking at, quite a number of guests were printing topics and searching. Spam attacks for sure when I searched up a few of the IP addresses.

 

I turned off guest searching for now because that's quite resource-intensive (and hey, if real guests want to search they can sign up) and banned a few IP ranges that were showing up constantly - I and the other admins can keep an eye on that activity and it should drop off if we continue doing that.

And as if by magic we're down to a mere 300 guests.

 

I spotted a guest 'printing a topic' in the online list the other day and honestly forgot that was even a feature on this site :lol:

Nice job Iz! I've allowed guests to view the forum again and we can monitor from here on in.