Why are the WBF servers so slow? PLEASE READ FOR FINAL UPDATED ANNOUNCEMENT

[treitz3]

*Fingers crossed*

Tom

 

[Steve Williams]

A few words of explanation to those who found they could not access the site this morning.......For months we have been chasing down causes as to why the forum is slow as well as an ongoing problem as to why members who subscribe to threads by email notification have not been receiving email notices that a new post has been made to that subscribed to thread. Julian has been chasing our web host for 6 months to find the reason but always comes to a dead end answer . This plus the fact that he receives daily at least 500 bounced emails that our server for some reason rejects and does not forward to the subscribed member.

Also we have been dogged by a frequent bot swarm on a regular basis that cripples the speed of our members accessing the forum.

Putting a firewall around the countries found to be the source of the bot swarm cures the problem but unfortunately locks out registered members from those countries.

As a result and after an extensive search I was fortunate to meet up with a very skilled and knowledgeable Xenforo programmer who has written countless add ons for Xenforo....one of these add ons was a bot crusher. Julian and I hired him to help us with the frequent forum slow downs which we found resolves with a server restart however we get we needed to drill down and get to the root cause. He has also installed this new add on bot chaser

One thing we discovered (much to our dismay) was the use recent use of Cloud Flare on WBF. This added another level of complexity and sadly it was serving to slow things down and we made the decision to remove Cloud Flare after a short trial on WBF. We decided to use the add on written by this Xenforo programmer as he showed us that the add-on could quickly show an assault and we could ban the bots and the country from which they originate. The upside to this he told us was that after a few weeks of failing to connect with us the bots go away to bother other busy forums, such that we can lift the ban on the involved country. This was the case recently with Brazil from where we were being constantly attacked. A block on Brazil was carried out and of course I received emails from many members from Brazil who could no longer log in unless they used a VPN (which WBF frowns upon). Happy to say the ban on Brazil has been lifted and hopefully those excluded members find their way back to WBF

As to the inability to receive emails for members subscribed to interesting threads, we think that finally this problem has been solved. However in doing the fix today it involved correcting DNS as well as SSL errors which caused many members to be locked out myself included. This caused my morning to be answering emails from members who could not log in. I am happy to report that Julian has stated that he has not received any bounced emails today. Im hoping therefore that subscribing to interesting threads and requesting email confirmation of a new post has been resolved

Please post here if there are any ongoing issues

Sadly what was thought to be a quick fix took us 5 hours to resolve and even I was locked out.

I thank everyone for their patience and understanding and for your continuing devotion to WBF

 

[Solartiger]

Good morning,

From South Africa the forum is unavailable without a VPN. There is no error message, just „a page not found error“ when you use the forum URL.

 

[Steve Williams]

we'll sadly that again boils down to the bot attacks we have had recently from south and central Africa and a firewall was placed around them. I will have them remove the block today. and hopefully the situation will resolve. Im learning that these are Ai bots which change their IP address es every second hence the bot swarms

 

[Steve Williams]

we'll sadly that again boils down to the bot attacks we have had recently from south and central Africa and a firewall was placed around them. I will have them remove the block today. and hopefully the situation will resolve. Im learning that these are Ai bots which change their IP address es every second hence the bot swarms

The blocks have been removed but we also looked into why you were getting "page not found" error. That has been found and solved

Please confirm that you can access the site now WITHOUT using a VPN as your usual IP address should get you access. Thank you for bringing this to our attention