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[m626t]

no problem signing in today per moi

[69MG]

I've been getting sporadic error messages for the last couple of days. I just refresh the screen and it solves the problem. I noticed that the number of users is vastly overstated and I wonder if that is causing the issue.

It is currently Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:42 pm
In total there are 1601 users online :: 3 registered, 1 hidden and 1597 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[Quann]

Last couple days have been really rough. Can barely get anything to load without an error on here.

[MikeUMA]

Last couple days have been really rough. Can barely get anything to load without an error on here.

I saw the same yesterday. Lots of the 503 / Resource Unavailable messages. Seems this is happening sporadically. Right now I'm just going to keep an eye on it and see if it gets better or worse over the next few days. Refreshing/resubmitting seems to get through, but yesterday & today it required more attempts than in the last month or so.

[MikeUMA]

I've been getting sporadic error messages for the last couple of days. I just refresh the screen and it solves the problem. I noticed that the number of users is vastly overstated and I wonder if that is causing the issue.

It is currently Mon Oct 13, 2025 4:42 pm
In total there are 1601 users online :: 3 registered, 1 hidden and 1597 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

That's a good call out, thank you. I just checked and these were the numbers:
It is currently October 16th, 2025, 9:53 am
In total there are 501 users online :: 6 registered, 0 hidden and 495 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

3x more when you saw it.

"Users" might be any activity on the board, whether that's coming from a registered person or some sort of bot traffic, either a legitimate search crawler like Google or Bing, or perhaps AI search models, or malicious bots trying to poke holes in site security.

I might look at those numbers when the error messages come up and look for a correlation.

[MikeUMA]

Notes to self...
Seeing a higher frequency of errors this afternoon. User count data:
It is currently October 16th, 2025, 4:06 pm
In total there are 604 users online :: 7 registered, 0 hidden and 597 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Registered users: Baidu [Spider], Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], m626t, Majestic-12 [Bot], MikeUMA, Semrush [Bot]

Interesting that Baido and Semrush show as registered users. They aren't, they're crawlers.

Also saw this:
Most users ever online was 1708 on October 13th, 2025, 4:19 pm
There's no particular reason why we should have had a spike this past Monday afternoon. I'm assuming the amount of bot activity in general is increasing. We only have 1813 total registered accounts, many of which are dormant.

[InnervisionsUMASS]

I'm assuming the amount of bot activity in general is increasing.

So what exactly are "bots" related to a message board? Are these things just fishing for data?

[MikeUMA]

So what exactly are "bots" related to a message board? Are these things just fishing for data?

It used to be about creating spam accounts, but lately I've been seeing chatter that it's more about AI, and the LLMs (large language models) going through content to make the AI smarter / more knowledgeable.

I may turn Cloudflare back on. That had minor drawbacks of its own, but it stopped the site responsiveness problems.

[InnervisionsUMASS]

So what exactly are "bots" related to a message board? Are these things just fishing for data?

It used to be about creating spam accounts, but lately I've been seeing chatter that it's more about AI, and the LLMs (large language models) going through content to make the AI smarter / more knowledgeable.

I may turn Cloudflare back on. That had minor drawbacks of its own, but it stopped the site responsiveness problems.

Thank you for the details. Makes total sense, and obviously super annoying.

Cloudflare sucked, but it's was much better than the constant resource errors because of stupid AI. Sign me up for turning it back on.

[McKinney]

Maybe not worth the complexity, but what about having CloudFlare for guests and off for registered users?

AI scrapers have to go through CloudFlare. Registered users get a clean experience.

[Rolling Ridge]

Cloudflare sucked, but it's was much better than the constant resource errors because of stupid AI. Sign me up for turning it back on.

I agree. It's taking me two to four clicks to get a page refresh at times, and it was basically hopeless on my phone at the game today. Cloudflare was preferable to this.

BTW, I do not mean this in any way as a criticism. I appreciate all that is done to maintain this site and try to improve it. I'm only expressing my preference based on my experience. Whatever you choose I will support. Thank you.

[m626t]

just now, no issues signing in or using the site.

[InnervisionsUMASS]

God bless ya m626t, glad it was smooth yesterday. It's been brutal this morning.

[Rolling Ridge]

God bless ya m626t, glad it was smooth yesterday. It's been brutal this morning.

Yeah, it's been taking me up to five refreshes to get to a post, and at least one almost every time I try to open anything, This may be the worst I've ever seen it.

[Juice Stand]

Submitting one vote for bringing back the Cloudfare clicky thing if it helps functionality. I wasn't able to log in at all over the weekend and once I got logged in today the functionality dropped off again.