forum.defence-force.org

I'll try to see tomorrow if I can get the .htaccess hack done tomorrow.

Thanks for your efforts!
Hope it will be efficient without having to spend hours on it.

I'm currently poking at the server, if you can't access, just look on my Twitter updates:

I added the htaccess, now the question are:
- Can any of you still access the server
- Does that has any impact on the performance

No problem for the forum access here.
Saw users drop from permanent 200-300, to 22.
Time will tell but I do hope we have no more timeouts. Well done so far

WHO IS ONLINE
In total there are 32 users online :: 1 registered, 2 hidden and 29 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 319 on 08 Nov 2019 10:48 pm

Indeed, 319 users yesterday...

Only 2 guests currently, and the forum works like a charm

Maybe the thing is that 'defence force' is quite an attractive name for some

Ouch, got timeouts again when posting my Sea Battle hi-score .
1st when trying to submit the message
2nd when writing it again, I tried to attach the picture
3rd attempt was OK but took a while, I thought I'd have another timeout.

Around 4:20 pm (French time)
Maybe because the image server hasn't benefited from the new heavy-traffic protection?

I'm going to check tomorrow, it's easier to get some base line by comparing traffic from one day to another, but yeah... *sigh*

Going to update to the very latest version of phpbb, expect downtime...

Of course after upgrading to the latest version the forum started immediately with an ERROR 500.
Looking at the logs it appears that the "phpBB Media Embed PlugIn" was causing errors, so I disabled it.
Installed version is 1.0.1 it looks like there's a new 1.1.1 version, going to give a shot...

Several forums I usually visit are experiencing the same issues. Massive connections from China ISPs, mostly from Android OS.

Not sure what countermeasures they implemented, but in at least two I had to deactivate the data saving option of my mobile Chrome to be able to log in.

They mostly banned IPs, or that is what they said.

data saving option?

Not sure how to translate it.. it is an option of the mobile version of Chrome to save data when loading pages... it is in the config.

In any case, I have been told that there is some info about how to deal with this chinese crawlers here https://www.johnlarge.co.uk/blocking-ag ... pers-bots/

Edit: sorry, just noticed this link is the same that was previously posted.

Again...
"In total there are 224 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 223 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 350 on Mon Jan 20, 2020 11:31 pm"