Problems logging in

[moggiethouable]

Am I alone I wonder?
The site seems very slow, sometimes taking numerous attempts at logging in.

[svenedin]

You are definitely not alone. There is another recent thread about it. Simon reports that "bad actors" are flooding the forum with bots. They are not registered users so not logging in but when they browse the forum in large numbers this causes everything to run very slowly. Simon is going to try to increase the forum security against this.

viewtopic.php?p=717396&hilit=slow#p717396

Stephen

[mrs.smith2012]

Glad it’s not just me!

[Bill_qaz]

Commonly getting this message and after a short time it opens page as normal.

Screenshot_20260318-173512_Samsung Internet.jpg (31.97 KiB) Viewed 14321 times

[panky]

This is why.14,566 'bad actors' accessing the message board at one time - nearly 38,000 on Sunday

In total there are 14573 users online :: 7 registered, 0 hidden and 14566 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 37962 on Sun Mar 15, 2026 9:50 am

[moggiethouable]

Why they would pick on this site is a mystery to me.
But perhaps it is time to make 35000 visitors register.
If someone is genuine they will take the time, "bad actors" will go elsewhere.

[Sleeper]

Bad Actor ( Putin ) , policy of western destabilisation...

John ;-)

[Mervin]

And why would Vlad want to de-stabilise this message board?
Possibly it is just lonely individuals with nothing better to occupy their sad little lives.

[svenedin]

According to a quick web search. These are not human beings they are automated pieces of software, "bots". Of course they can be directed by human beings but they may be largely autonomous.

From a Google search:

"Based on forum support discussions and user reports, it is a common phenomenon for forums to experience significantly increased load times or technical errors, such as full databases (e.g., xf_session_activity errors), caused by an overwhelming influx of "guest" users.

Nature of Guests: While some guests are legitimate users, many are bots, search engine crawlers, or scrapers accessing the forum instantly upon new posts.

Impact on Performance: Thousands of guest users can cause small forums to get "stuck" or become very slow.

Mitigation: Administrators often have to enable "Guests Must Login" features to stop bot activity"


Some more information from further searching:

The influx of guest users slows down forums for several reasons:

1. The Rise of Aggressive AI Scrapers and Bots
Data Harvesting for AI: Many "guests" are actually automated bots from artificial intelligence companies crawling forums to train Large Language Models (LLMs).
Aggressive Behavior: Unlike traditional search engine bots (like Googlebot) that methodically crawl, AI bots are often "hyper-aggressive," requesting large batches of pages in short bursts without observing proper slowdown rules, which overwhelms server capacity.
"Bad" Scrapers: Data mining bots often ignore robots.txt files (instructions on what not to scrape), resulting in relentless, high-volume traffic.

2. High Resource Consumption ("Noisy Neighbors")
Database Overload: Forums are dynamic, relying on databases to load content. Thousands of automated requests in a few minutes can lock up a database, causing "database connection" errors.
Un-cached Content Access: Bots often crawl deep into old archives rather than just the homepage, forcing the server to do more work in real-time, which consumes more CPU and RAM.
Shared Hosting Issues: Many forums operate on shared hosting. An aggressive bot attack on one forum can consume all server resources, slowing down other websites on the same server.

3. Misidentification of "Guests"
Non-Logged-In Users: Forums often classify anyone not logged in as a "guest." This includes human visitors, search engine bots, and malicious scrapers alike. During high bot activity, the "guests" count can spike from hundreds to thousands, masking the true source of the load.
Why Not Just Block Them?
Difficulty Identifying Bad Traffic: It is difficult to distinguish a "bad" scraping bot from a "good" search engine bot (like Google) or a legitimate potential human user. Blocking all "guests" can negatively affect search engine rankings.
Fake User Agents: Many scrapers disguise themselves as normal web browsers, making simple filtering ineffective.
While some admins implement robots.txt rules or use tools like Cloudflare to limit this traffic, the overwhelming volume of new AI crawlers makes this a persistent issue in modern web administration.


Stephen

[geoberni]

And why would Vlad want to de-stabilise this message board?
Possibly it is just lonely individuals with nothing better to occupy their sad little lives.

They're malicious AI Bots.

I just took a look at a privately operated Forum (i.e. 1 guy has run it for the last 22 years) I used professionally before I retired from H&S, for which I still have an active account. It also uses phpBB .
Like this place it's use has dropped off with a rise in Farcebook use.

In total there are 98 users online :: 6 registered, 0 hidden and 92 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 812 on Thu Mar 12, 2026 1:25 pm

Those 6 Registered were me and 5 Bots belonging to Ahrefs [Bot], Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], Google Adsense [Bot], Semrush [Bot].

At the same time, the Users here :

In total there are 11225 users online :: 7 registered, 0 hidden and 11218 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 37962 on Sun Mar 15, 2026 9:50 am

The 7 registered are 2 people and 5 Search Engine Bots, Ahrefs [Bot], Amazon [Bot], Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot]
So not exactly the same 5 Search Engines .


But look at those Most Users ever online.
Both Forums had their most ever in the past week, but our figure here is through the roof, around 47 times the other Board's count.

[Sleeper]

" And why would Vlad want to de-stabilise this message board?
Possibly it is just lonely individuals with nothing better to occupy their sad little lives. "

35,000 of them ?

John ;-)

[moggiethouable]

So,
at risk of repeating myself,
is it possible to do away with the facility of guests online?
If a guest wishes to genuinely get involved he would have to register, that would eliminate bots wouldn't it?
Or am I showing my ignorance?

[Mervin]

"They're malicious AI Bots."
Which surely don't generate themselves. Some saddo must have to start the ball rolling?
I have never used AI and have no intention of doing so. Therefore I know exactly the square root of 0 about them.
My question is still why would Vladimir set his sights on this message board as somebody alleged?

[Bill_qaz]

Thank you to all involved in sorting out the site issues.
Good to have it back and functional

[geoberni]

Thank you to all involved in sorting out the site issues.
Good to have it back and functional

Not resolved, just mitigated by the looks of it.

If you check the Who's Online details, it still shows ....

In total there are 8108 users online :: 7 registered, 0 hidden and 8101 guests

Registered included the authorised Search Engines Bots, the rest are the Malicious Actors.

[svenedin]

I don't see any difference. It's still extremely slow for me and it timed out on me repeatedly this morning.

Stephen

[Bill_qaz]

Yes still slow Berni but yesterday had no access just a gateway error message.

[les]

Timed out on me yesterday, who/whatever is behind all this, has achieved their objectives.

[PeterCat]

Another scary aspect of AI ? if this activity is being repeated across the thousands of similar sites then it indicates the power required to populate and maintain AI. clearly a massive data base will result ( with good bad and indifferent material in it ) This will be touted as an invaluable resource for all of us but who will really proffit?