I Do Believe We've Been Invaded

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Hui

I also don't understand*why*they would. They've sent 4000 bots to our thread today because, say, it links to lots of YouTube videos, and then.. what? What's the profit? What's the*point? They're not even posting!

I do wonder though if this is a credit to Mithadan and the new security systems. To post you have to make an account first, and it seems like that part of the security screening is really holding back the flow.

[Elvellon]

I can't help but wonder why it seems like nobody is doing anything about the bots? I was hoping that bringing it up and pointing out the target of the bot activity would help spur some kind of change. Are there any admins or mods who can be contacted or who can comment on the situation? I don't know about anyone else, but the bot activity is seriously hampering my ability to use the forum.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Elvellon

I can't help but wonder why it seems like nobody is doing anything about the bots? I was hoping that bringing it up and pointing out the target of the bot activity would help spur some kind of change. Are there any admins or mods who can be contacted or who can comment on the situation? I don't know about anyone else, but the bot activity is seriously hampering my ability to use the forum.

The admins are working on it, but it's not something that they can fix immediately. Give them a bit of time to work on it.

In the meantime, though I get the 508 errors very frequently too, they don't really limit me all that much beyond being a mild annoyance. Just refresh the page once or twice, and you get through. It's annoying when it happens as you're submitting a post, cause then the site thinks you are trying to post twice and puts you in the "timeout zone" for posting in rapid succession, and I am always scared I will lose my post when this happens - but I've never lost it, and you literally click on any other page to get out of the timeout counter.

[Snowdog]

The bots are getting wily since all they have to talk to on Arwen Undomiel is each other. They have gone looking for more old tech boards to invade.

[Elvellon]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

The admins are working on it, but it's not something that they can fix immediately. Give them a bit of time to work on it.

I appreciate that. That's the first acknowledgment I've seen that anyone is working on it, hence my comment, but maybe I missed it.

[Mithadan]

If you have recently entered the forums, you have all noticed the frequent 508 error messages (insufficient resources) preventing access to the Downs, I have attempted a fix.

A 508 message, based upon my feeble, tech-deficient research, is the result of a site's servers being overwhelmed by too many users viewing or interacting with the site. Others have commented upon the large number of visitors shown as being on the site, often more than 2500 (the counter shows that the most people on the site at one time was 6300 this past May).

Recently, Huinesoron noticed that one forum, The Movies, was consistently attracting more than 90% of the visitors. He also noticed that one thread, Full-Length LoTR Parody Movies, was showing an absurd amount of "hits," presently more than 22 million (not a typo) with the number increasing by hundreds of thousands every week. It appears that something in this thread has been attracting bots/AI scrapers. This is based upon observation, not technical confirmation. I know of no way to determine whether any particular post in the thread is attracting the attention.

The primary posters on this thread over the last several months have been Huinesoron and Galadriel55 who have been using it to develop their Finrod Rock Opera (a worthy endeavor if you have not noticed it). After discussing this with them, I have moved this thread into a private forum. It is no longer visible in The Movies. They will continue to privately work on the Finrod Opera in the private forum. I am sure that if any of you want to see it or follow their progress, they will accommodate you.

Before I moved the thread, The Movies forum showed roughly 2000 visitors. After I moved it, it showed 135 visitors. I suspect that the "visitors" that we viewing/mining the thread when it was moved will remain there, clogging our server until they leave the page they are viewing. After that, they will not be able to reach the thread, hopefully curing the 508 problem. Or maybe this ham-handed effort will not be a fix. We'll see.
__________________

[Huinesoron]

Thank you, Mithadan. Hopefully now we're in hiding things will settle down. If anyone still wants to see what's going on with Finrod-Zong, you can access the Google Doc of the current state of it through my signature or G55's. If the bots want to try and DDOS Google, they're welcome to!

(Credit where it's due, it was you and Elvellon who put together where the bots were swarming; I just theorised on why.)

At this time there are 2796 "guests" on the Downs, with only about 600 of them viewing specific forums. The rest are hopefully either still viewing the Zong thread until they refresh, have been bounced to the main page, or are hitting the "no such thread" page; in any of those cases I hope we'll soon see a drop-off in numbers.

EDIT: For reference/tracking, 15 minutes of "Viewing" and "User" counts. Times are in GMT+1, date is 2024-08-09; this is about half an hour after the Zong thread was moved.

hS

[Galadriel55]

I have absolutely no clue where you guys can see the visitors to specific fora. I can only find the guests listed on the main page - still around 2.8K, similar to Hui's observation a couple hours back. I still ran into the 508 twice while jumping back and forth between the forums. And views to the Zong are still at 22M - up from 17.9M a month ago as observed by Elvellon. Let's see how these numbers change over the coming days and keep our fingers crossed. Thank you Mithadan!