And we're back!

[Mslwte]

Some of you may of noticed that we had some downtime earlier. Turns out we just kill the internet

It's hard being the shit hottest techno resource on the web


P.S we need to keep up with the house keeping lol.

[Críoch]

Fucking class!!

[Mslwte]

We're good for now it seems but they are monitoring us so we'll have to see how it goes.

[speen]

Nice job, but what was the problem?

[2latuile]

Nice job, but what was the problem?

[Amøbe]

I was crying in the shower the whole time

[Mslwte]

I was crying in the shower the whole time

[Críoch]

Nice job, but what was the problem?

Not entirely sure man. Hosting company are being a bit vague. We have some housekeeping to do alright.. parts of the site are unnecessarily too big & some deleting is probably overdue.

We've been getting a cRaZY amount of guests on the site recently. If you look on the main page, at the legend on the bottom.. we had 799 people on the site one day. Know people are doing fuck all ATM.. but I doubt they're just THAT bored

We got our service temporarily suspended because of bandwidth issues; we're using too much. We are one a mean AF budget package & maybe it's time we go up a more expensive gear. We haven't ever asked for donations or done ads etc.. preferring to pay for all among ourselves.. but we might be at a point where our pride might have to take a back seat. Will see anyway. I reckon we will do a clean out & a bit of optimisation over the next few days & then we will have a clearer picture.

I've seen other forums discuss getting crazy amounts of guests but their insights have not been helpful in explaining whats happening, if it's a bad thing & if so; how to combat it. We are still waiting for advice from another dept of the hosting company regarding that.

Might be barking up the wrong tree altogether..so if anyone knows better,, please jump in

[Críoch]

This thread / forum right now as I posted: 87 guests

Screenshot_20200507_145507.jpg (15.16 KiB) Viewed 3578 times

[Críoch]

Me barfunkel & a few mates

Screenshot_20200507_151041.jpg (33.38 KiB) Viewed 3574 times

[Mslwte]

I'm getting emails again saying that the account has been suspended once more so I'm expecting that we'll be down again soon.

[Críoch]

Ffkkkjjn

[2latuile]

Cheap hosting companies are cheap because they don't invest much time in trying to assist their users - at least that's my experience - so I wouldn't expect much from them about the incident (most probably their monitoring software just automatically kicked in, decided you were eating "too much" resources and cut you out, period). As to why we suddenly have that many "guests" ("528 users online" when writing this - crioch, your humble servant and 526 "guests"), it's hard to tell without access to the site's stats and logs (and even then...). @John did you check the PHPBB admin panel ? IIRC there are some stats on visits / most visited post etc, this might (or not) provide some hints...

Time for a "support" button and a better hosting I think.

[dcom]

You could start by making the site members only for a while, meaning that only registered users get to see anything, unregistered/guests get a login page. Maybe suspend registrations for a while as well. Do you have a dashboard where you see your bandwidth usage? Usually hosting companies put in a choker so that the bandwidth restriction is enforced at the network level. phpBB isn't really a bandwidth hog, so your cap must be relatively low. I do these things for a living, so if you want to pick my brain, hit me up privately.

[Mslwte]

I've been looking for an option to make the site visable to forum members only (for the meantime) but I. Unable to find such a setting.

I've also reverted back the activating new members manually as its possible we've had a bot breach?

Having a mooch about yesterday I did see some stats saying that the test site we have, which is in the background has had 3 time as much data usage recently. Also something that hostgator asked is did we use wordpress on the site. Not sure if this was a security question or the fact that we have wordpress on the blog which hasn't been updated for a while. I suppose this could be a vulnerability.

So many possibilities atm it difficult to know where the problem lays. Also hostgator wouldn't tell me where the issue was. I did ask several times.

We appreciate all the help btw! We have plannar working in the background. He has helped us quite a lot in recent years and is an unsung hero for subsekt!

[dcom]

There has been an influx of attacks towards WP installations lately; unless you're using some exotic plugins, just keep WP up to date - if it's a recent enough version, you can set it to auto-update. If your WP has been pwned, it could be used to send spam or do any number of rather unsavoury things that'll eat up bandwidth. It might be a deliberate denial of service attack to shut the siute because someone's taken an issue on something that's been discussed here (business techno, plagiarists, abusive star-type people or their support cohorts, us just being the cunts we are), it might not - the possibilities are many.

[dcom]

I just read up on how to make the board private, it's a bit of a pain in the glutes because you'll have to modify each forum's permissions separately, but it seems doable even without being a phpBB savant: for all forums, give bots and guests No Access from Admin -> Permissions -> Forum Permissions.

[Mslwte]

We probably do have a few enemies haha.

We've considered deleting the blog. But to be honest a lot of work went into (crioch) and it would be a shame to lose it. An update maybe all it needs anyway.

Anyone know of a script that can remove bots from a forum?

[Mslwte]

I just read up on how to make the board private, it's a bit of a pain in the glutes because you'll have to modify each forum's permissions separately, but it seems doable even without being a phpBB savant: for all forums, give bots and guests No Access from Admin -> Permissions -> Forum Permissions.

Yeah I was really hoping there was a one button does all option haha. Will look into thank you!

[Mslwte]

Well it's been a long few days but we could be back in business!

Hopefully all the issues have been sorted now. Time will tell but we need to say a massive thank you Sam and Mark (planar) for helping us out with this! Without them being here for us we would be a in right pickle, we are very lucky!