High downtime for the forum subdomain

[HenrikErlandsson]

I hope it's OK if I post in this forum; there seems to be no 'general forum' forum?

For the past few days, I've been trying to click links beginning with, or navigating to, forum.lazarus.freepascal.org. I get error 404, 500 or similar. The next day or hour, the link works.

I'm suspecting attacks and CloudFlare or similar solution is required?

When it happens, I test lazarus.freepascal.org and freepascal.org and they show me a webpage. So maybe it's something else going on.

Also when it happens, obviously I can't log in - at least not by navigating to forum.lazarus.freepascal.org.

The bottom line is that it's very hard to get on this forum, either from search results or by logging in, lately.

It happens on Windows; I haven't tried on mobile or Linux, if there's somehow a difference there. No VPN or proxy. I'm in Sweden. Other websites work when it happens. "Down for just me" agrees it's down when it happens.

I hope this is enough info. 

My suggestion is to track downtime and follow up with countermeasures, so the forum stays working.

[marcov]

The forum and wiki are dynamic, using PHP, and that costs more CPU than static webpages. This is why rogue AI bots can effectively DDOS the website with their indexing (that ignores robots and the like).

The administrators are trying to fight this, by optimizing/configuring PHP and firewall rules, but the AI bot spells are getting worse. Not much alternative than simply waiting it out and hope for the best

[HenrikErlandsson]

Cheers Marcov, I'm a member of some other forums that have had this problem. Some use CloudFlare (non-click or single-click 'CAPTCHA', which is the wrong word because CAPTCHA is basically = image tiles ), some use "browser verification" (don't know too much about this). In both cases it seems to have fixed the problems.

The way they find out that they are being attacked is from a high number of Guest users, it seems.

I added some more info to my original post.

[Boleeman]

It's sad that rogue AI bots do DDOS to the Lazarus website with their indexing (I thought that some kid was doing the DDOS, like during in the Covid era when using Microsoft Teams).

I had trouble connecting up to the Lazarus forum so I took a break for a number of days.

[simone]

I also report that the "cookie problem" still exists. I'm still forced to remove the PHPSESSID from the URLs in order to access. This happens with any browser and various cookie settings.