Atari-forum access issues. Is anybody else affected?

[exxos]

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.

:lol:

Yeah, I'm torn between , 50% I don't care if the forum vanishes, and 50% ,well it be a shame to let it die a slow death...

But yeah, running a server in 2026 is not simple. I've spent months on it so far. I don't really understand what they are doing with the white listing and stuff because you cannot trust the user agent string anyway.

I started out blocking based on user agents and it simply cannot be done. I had loads of bots pretending to be Google, I had to write a whole script to actually check every IP address against Google's IP list to really verify if its google or not. That came about because Google apparently was causing such a huge flood of traffic the server was hanging. After running my script and checking things out the majority of the traffic was "fake google bot". Mix in the hundred other similar problems and it soon quickly turns into a insolvable mess. Those scripts still run every few hours.

It's just speculation on my part, but it sounds like they are basically blocking everything by default and then trying to carve out where the good users live by requesting IP addresses and user agents.. But IPs changes constantly. I have several devices which would give a completely different agents on the same IP. Plus it depends where I connected to, like home , or my girlfriends etc. But user agents, whitelisting or blacklisting isn't reliable.

I *do* block really old OS and browsers, Genuine users are on recent browsers. But like some people use old macs, like was mentioned last week I think it was, but a lot of bad traffic generally comes with really stupidly low versions like chrome version 22 etc. so indeed there are some innocent people can fall victim to that.

I actually wrote an article about all this a few weeks ago as well..

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/articles/s ... _2026.html

Certainly not a guide or a how-to guide, but really the "story so far".

I think pretty much everyone these days says its practically impossible to determine real users from bots and it is certainly true. Like I said a few times, we are basically a English orientated forum and were not going to get users from the Middle East in general. so I just ended up geo-blocking pretty much everything there. Thats 21% of the internet. Likely not wise for any larger site, but a small community like us, its "safe" to do. I'm even working on audits scripts to make sure nothing mistakenly got banned as well. Somehow a France ISP got blacklisted, so im trying to figure out why. I have like 60 scripts doing various things and im working on retiring and optimising a lot of stuff because it just simply is irrelevant now.

The bottom line is, the majority of sites now hide behind cloudflare, which I will not do for many reasons I said before. Or you figure out ways to fight the traffic yourself, which is why it is taking me a incredible amount of time to find reliable solutions without resorting to companies like Cloudflare. It's basically a full-time job going through everything systematically and keeping on top of it. My work is even harder as I host the atari-wiki , that causes its own work and problems as well. It basically took me two years to figure out (well, A.I. did) that Cleantalk's extensions which protect us from all sorts, was actually causing cache issues which I noticed 2 years back. I'm still monitoring all that sure nothing broke..

Even if you just look at everything I posted on the forum about all this since it started being a huge problem a couple of years ago.. I have been ploughing 100's of hours into solutions, those guys on AF are starting "2 years behind" now. If they want to roll their own security they need someone full-time to do constant analysis of everything.. That's what I was doing but every few days the landscape changes... What worked yesterday doesn't work next week.. Rinse and repeat.

Probably way more of an answer than was needed ;) :P

[rubber_jonnie]

@mikro @mrbombermillzy

And whats sad is that as somebody who frequents a lot of forums things like this are happening more frequently, and smaller forums just cannot keep up, nor do they have the knowledge or tools to get themselves out of these situations.

Sites will die and that is a crying shame.

[exxos]

And whats sad is that as somebody who frequents a lot of forums things like this are happening more frequently, and smaller forums just cannot keep up, nor do they have the knowledge or tools to get themselves out of these situations.

Sites will die and that is a crying shame.

We've said the same for a while now. A small community simply can't survive in 2026 now. Its risk cloudflare or die these days. I'm getting so sick of those "tick to enter" from cloudflare these days !!

I have half considered offering a hosting service for ones who are dying and need help etc, but that means I then become responsible for multiple sites (which I wouldn't do for free either, it would soak up huge amount of time time that I don't really have ) . But even so, what I have in place would only work on phpbb based forums anyway. Plus a lot of them probably are running really old versions of stuff which wouldn't run on my new system anyway. So that would be a ton of work fixing stuff up to even consider running on my own host.

So same to me, crying shame to see all these sites disappear. Though the age of hobby servers running publicly on the Internet, is sadly a thing of the getting to be a thing of the past now :(

[rubber_jonnie]

So same to me, crying shame to see all these sites disappear. Though the age of hobby servers running publicly on the Internet, is sadly a thing of the getting to be a thing of the past now :(

I used to run a hobby server, but it just out of the question now. Too much admin and fighting to stay online against these torrents of traffic.

[exxos]

I used to run a hobby server, but it just out of the question now. Too much admin and fighting to stay online against these torrents of traffic.

Yeah it's a bit time consuming :pullhair: :stars: :headbang:

Problem is, tools were built like fail2ban to deal with attacks from like 20 years ago. Botnets are a whole new level. As you know, they change every few days. Just when you think you have it all nailed down, something else breaks.

[sporniket]

Did a check today on my phone (android), my daily driver firefox is still banned, while brave is not. Since I don't plan on switching, there's just more and more time between my attempts.

[mfro]

... my daily driver firefox is still banned ...

Firefox works fine for me with User Agent Switcher (a Firefox extension that allows to fake a different browser for specific sites).
Works for me with pretending a Chrome browser

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