[JasonB]

We have been aware of some issues with the SlotRacer site for a while now, first with an unfeasible number of visitors to the site over the last few months, then with some of our regular members reporting problems logging in, and on top of that a recent outage. 

Unfortunately I couldn't find any problems, but the recent outage meant I could put in a request to our web hosts technical department, who got back to me today.

We have now examined the server logs in detail and identified what is happening.

What is actually happening is that your site is being crawled very heavily by automated software, and it is being caught in a loop that generates an effectively unlimited number of pages.

These are not real pages on your site, but because of the way the site is built, the server accepts them and runs the page code anyway. Each one appears to the crawler as a new page containing further links, so it follows them, and the process repeats without end. The result is a limitless supply of addresses for automated software to work through.

The scale of this is considerable. During the period you reported the site as unavailable on 24 August, our logs recorded over one million requests in a single hour. That is what caused the timeouts. The server was not down, it was simply unable to keep up.

This is still happening. Today the site is receiving around fifty thousand requests per hour, and just over 182,000 requests so far today are for these invalid addresses.

The traffic comes from a very large number of different internet addresses, with no single source standing out, so it cannot be resolved by blocking individual addresses.

Basically the site is being overloaded by automated software. For a site like ours, a low key site, to have a million hits in an hour is ridiculous. The purpose of it is unclear, but the effects seem obvious enough.

I will be making some changes over the next few days, as the tech team have suggested, but they are site wide permission changes so if they don't work as expected it could have some unexpected consequences. But, we don't have a choice, our regular members are being put off by log in problems, so....

Here we go.

[Kevan]

Hmmm, a bizarre thing to be doing by someone for some weird reason

[Gordon Steadman]

How very strange!

I've had no problems at all and the Mac has just logged in as normal every morning. No slowing down at all.

Hope you get it sorted.

[JasonB]

Hmmm, a bizarre thing to be doing by someone for some weird reason

We've been thinking the same, why would the number of people viewing the forum suddenly jump from 100 to 1,000 or more, it was 2,800+ earlier today, and what are they up to? Well the full message from the tech team seems to suggest that they're not actually up to anything malicious, it's just automated bot software which has got stuck in a loop, causing us to have an occasional overload. Welcome to the new world where bots don't actually have to mean any harm to cause it.

How very strange!

I've had no problems at all and the Mac has just logged in as normal every morning. No slowing down at all.

Hope you get it sorted.

Strange indeed. I haven't had any problems either, but other people have.

This sort of problem is always the most difficult, because if you haven't got the same problem, there are hundreds of possible issues, but there's no way to check if you've fixed it. Very frustrating.

[dazee]

I would not be surprised if you learn this is AI related.  Not just AI crawling the site for content to generate and tune models, but also Claude like agents or thinking models.  You basically now have not just companies but people from their home machines who generate a prompt asking for information on slot cars, and the agent will go off and research it over the Internet and crawl through resources itself.

The time period you mention this happening coincides closely to the launch of Qwen 3.8 which is the latest in the line of thinking models for deep research that is multi-modal and can consume alot of content while researching.

[BAracer]

On two of the popular US site, you have to confirm you are human every time you visit. Time for that here?

[Gordon Steadman]

On two of the popular US site, you have to confirm you are human every time you visit. Time for that here?

I'm not sure how they do that but if it's Cloudfare, I have no doubt that the smarter AIs will be able to get through a simple test without problems! It would be good if AI was limited to solving important problems rather than doing things like simple searches where they go for the lowest common denominator but get stuck in loops and cause the problems like here I suspect.
Google AI doesn't like Google!

[JasonB]

I've had to postpone the fix, as I have suspicions that the techie's suggestion could break the forum.

I'd obviously like to check before I implement it.

[KensRedZed]

I can log on for a week or two. Then I can't for a week. Then I can again.

The message I get says the site no longer exists, or has moved.

This has been going on for a about a year. I've tried clearing the cache, etc. Nothing fixes it. Then it magically comes back on it's own a few days later like nothing ever went wrong.

I log on every day to check up on anything new. (If I can). If you don't see my name on the recently logged on list, it's because I can't log on.

It kept timing out last night and would not let me move about the site.

I'm simply getting used to it by now.

That being said. I'm very thankful that Jason is actively trying to keep up with the demands of operating a forum. 

[Gordon Steadman]

Aha....for the very first time I got refused last evening with the message - "too many requests" - can't remember the reference number though -  425?

OK obviously this morning.