Atari-forum access issues. Is anybody else affected?

[1024MAK]

One thing really worries me: it's great and really appreciated that @1024MAK and others are so cooperative with white-listing people who ask for it. However I'm 100% confident that those people (who frequent more than one forum, regularly, reading all topics) are minority in comparison to people who visit atari-forum.com, see that it is down and leave. Then try in a week, in a month and then never return ever again.

I'm really worried when I see all those "we are busy", "we are working on it" etc posts because we are losing precious members of the community who maybe will never find their way back to AF again (believe or not there are people who are registered for a decade and have never made more than a couple of posts, not being in touch with anyone else).

I totally get that this is a free time activity and it's a thankless job but I can't understand why you don't accept external help and rather keep the forum dying right in front of our eyes. :(

I mean this in the best possible way, I'm just incredibly sad to see shrinking my most beloved forum (sorry Exxos ;)) day by day.

It's as pretty much as exxos says. Either the phpBB forum admin runs their own firewall / filter system (which requires a lot of work), uses Cloudflare or restricts the forum to logged in members only, or more likely, a combination of these things.

That's what these AI scraper bots and other scraper bots (that ignore rules files and which pretend to be humans) have resulted in.

I don't know the details on how the admin on Atari-Forum has implemented the firewall / filter system, I'm only a messenger.

As said above, lots of small forums are affected by these problems.

I will continue passing on messages if members want me to. But please do include the information that is needed. That includes your Atari-Forum user name, your browser user agent details and your IPv4 address or address range (and IPv6 if you can).

Mark

[prog99]

Not had any issues personally. Been on 3 different mobile networks and half a dozen WiFi networks on phone and laptop without issues recently.
There looks to be a broken fail2ban rule though as any image heavy thread will trigger a temporary ban.(Frank's diagnosis of the broken tt one....)

[exxos]

Its seems it could be the number of requests in a minute. If I click on the recent topics 3 times I get banned for a day. So it would fit that images could cause the same issue.

I ran into issues with images on the wiki and my website as there's sometimes 100s per page. So rate limiting had to be set rather high to avoid pages from failing to load fully.

Limits are that high on my config that only the worst of the worst floods get rate limited and further banned. Setting any lower limits and I break normal users.

It also gets worse if a user opens up a couple tabs at once on heavy pages. Some users open up several tabs at once on the forum for topics they want to read. Lower limits results in them getting broken page or banned over doing something innocent. Figuring out all this is not easy..

[dml]

I will continue passing on messages if members want me to. But please do include the information that is needed. That includes your Atari-Forum user name, your browser user agent details and your IPv4 address or address range (and IPv6 if you can).

Thanks Mark for helping / passing along messages/requests (I got your reply re: the blocked user but was not myself able to reply due to a temporary ban myself!)

There looks to be a broken fail2ban rule though as any image heavy thread will trigger a temporary ban.(Frank's diagnosis of the broken tt one....)

This is exactly what happened to me while reading Frank's thread :) The images did not load - and trying to open an image or refresh the thread resulted in the server no longer answering requests. I know I was logged in at the time because my username/avatar was visible it before the final refresh...