Forum feedback

[Carnage]

The site is now runnning through Cloudflare. Guest numbers are slowly dropping so it seems to be working. You may see an occasional captcha. Let me know if it becomes problematic. I hope to dial it back once I'm able to figure out why it's happening.

Took a few mins. and a few tries to get past the verification page just now. Not a dig, I get why you've added it, just an FYI.

[Hambeast]

That's good to know because it's exactly the thing I'm trying to avoid. I hate getting stuck in an endless loop of captchas so if people are getting stuck on them, I'll need to make adjustments.

Are you using any privacy related stuff? Non-Chrome browser, vpn, adblock etc? I don't want you to disable them, I'm just curious about what configs are having a hard time.

[Eoin McLove]

I just had the quick question asking me if I'm human. I said yes and it fucking believed me    dumbass AI.

[Halo]

I assume those visitors are AI bots crawling sites harvesting data, a few other forums have mentioned that

[Hambeast]

Yeah, this forum runs on "Simple Machines Forum" and there's a discussion there with others facing the same issue. I'm noticing the same behaviour with the majority of traffic coming from Brazil, but it's still fairly distributed.

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=592345.0

I've had to totally block South America, Africa, and Asia until the traffic dies down. In the last 12 hours the site has received 250k requests from these continents, compared to 9k from Ireland.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

the great replAIcement

[Carnage]

Are you using any privacy related stuff? Non-Chrome browser, vpn, adblock etc? I don't want you to disable them, I'm just curious about what configs are having a hard time.

No, just Chrome on Android phone, no add-ons or privacy software.

This is the first time I've been able to get onto the forum since that post earlier. Between now and then, I've gotten stuck in an endless verification loop. No captchas, just the verification page refreshing itself every 15 seconds or so, so there was no time for it to complete its cycle.

I cleared my cache multiple times inbetween attempts, no success 'til now.

Edit: Came out of it after that, came back to the site a few mins. leter and had the same problem. On a whim I switched to data and got straight back in, so might the delay be network related? I'm on Sky fibre here, and it's just this site, so might it be a setting somewhere between the two?

Edit 2: Yep, switching to data bypasses the Cloudflare page and brings me straight to the forum, but when I switch back to wifi (even in the same session) I'm hung up with that.

[Hambeast]

Thanks for the info. I don't expect anybody to put up with that. We're back to regular numbers now so I've loosened things up. Europe, North America, and Australia should no longer be getting captchas. If anybody knows of members outside of those 3 continents I can make further adjustments to make sure they're not blocked.

[Carnage]

Back to normal now, cheers. Fair play to you for putting the work in, pain in the arse I'm sure.

[Bürggermeister]

Getting a cert error using Firefox on PC. Working ok on Firefox on the phone.

[Hambeast]

Looking into this.

[Hambeast]

I think this has been caused by the switchover of the SSL Certificate from Let's Encrypt to Cloudflare. I was experiencing the same on Firefox Android but not Firefox PC. I was playing around with a few settings in Cloudflare at the same time so I'm not sure if I fixed it for everyone or just for myself.

Can you try again and see if it's working?

If not, can you try a private browsing window? The last resort would be clearing your browser (the "site settings" option specifically") to flush out the old certificate settings, but I know that can be annoying

[Bürggermeister]

Yeah, had to clear everything for the site. Working ok now. Thanks.

[ochoill]

Thanks for the work on this, I had a few stalls earlier but forgot to screencap the error message - working absolutely painlessly now.  Chrome, android, data and wifi.

[Hambeast]

Happy to help! Glad to hear it's all working!