New Site Problem

[Richard Baker]

I click on something once and get a "Too many requests" error screen. This started a week ago randomly but it getting worse- last time I had just opened the forum page and clicked in the quick links-new posts and got the error.

This happening to anyone else or am I just special?

[Zubie]

Southwestforests reported the same thing, but apparently it seems more of an issue with Chrome rather than Firefox. I'll admit this makes little sense. I've stuck to firefox for reading this forum because chrome kept forgetting to only do this site using https, and would keep slipping up into unsecured plain http which caused hiccups. So, I haven't hit this problem.

I suppose it could be tied up with the database update problem that we know this forum has. I guess try a different browser see if that helps?

[southwestforests]

Southwestforests reported the same thing, but apparently it seems more of an issue with Chrome rather than Firefox.

And that 'too many requests' behavior I reported yesterday still holds true today.
Chrome it happens.
Firefox it does not.

Has been happening for a couple days to maybe a week before I got around to reporting it yesterday.
Was only just yesterday that I tried a non-Chrome browser.

Here in Firefox that 'SQL' error still happens when submitting a post.
But the too many requests thing has so far not happened.

Also have Microsoft's Edge browser in this box, have not yet tried it.

[irishtrek]

I've run into too many requests a couple of times, don't recall when or what I was wanting to look at, also I don't have chrome but I do have micro soft edge, hate the thing.

[Liberator]

It's been happening to me daily as well, I'm using Firefox. A refresh usually worked but not today I posted my reply and got the error, refreshed multiplies time with the same error and my post never posted.Will see what happens this time...

[Liberator]

It's been happening to me daily as well, I'm using Firefox. A refresh usually worked but not today I posted my reply and got the error, refreshed multiplies time with the same error and my post never posted.Will see what happens this time...
did a preview of the message, then hit submit and got.

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Table './o7f2b2r3_talk/phpbb_user_notifications' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

[Zubie]

The General Error SQL thing isn't news (alas). It's been going on for almost a year.

I would have to backtrack to recall what the deal was with https. I recall the forum wouldn't work if you did un-secured http, but worked fine if you did do https (which encrypts the transaction). Those that are having the problem, have you checked the padlock on the URL space in the browser?

[EVApodman]

I got site not working, unable to load, error 500. I hate to think that we are in for another round of problems again.

[irishtrek]

Back last fall when this site was having problems I would either hit refresh or reboot.

[Richard Baker]

I am now getting that error when I just try to open the site for the first time, not even trying to navigate in it

I am using chrome as I use Firefox and Edge for dedicated purposes and keep Chrome for personal things

[Richard Baker]

New problem today- I am posting but nothing gets into the thread

Not sure if this will either...

[Thom]

Close to finishing the migration out.

[irishtrek]

Just a few minutes ago I went to click the moves books index and got a page informing me that SSM was not available or something to that effect. Had to reboot.

[EVApodman]

It seems like we are back to a similar problem with the old login. I now have to try multiple times, getting site 500 errors trying to log in. Same type of error when I go from a thread to the main index.

And once again we are left high and dry with no moderators to see what is wrong.

It may only be a short time before the site is unreachable.

[irishtrek]

Went and logged into HT before SSM this evening and just before that I turned on my desk top fan, no problems so far.

[EVApodman]

It is getting more and more difficult for me to log on and use the forum.

[Thom]

I'm having to reload a lot to get it to.. well... load.

[Zubie]

It's been frequently slow to load, but it has been loading for me. Given that I exclusively follow the forum on my desktop using Firefox I wonder if that's a factor. One might consider time of day, but I know most people here are withing a couple of time zones of this server, so I suspect server traffic itself should not be the problem.

Typical browsers? Chrome historically was problematic for me. Opera, Safari, or Edge users?

[Saturn]

Firefox primary browser. Its been as "slow" as it's always been for me. But I feel that it's not browser-specific. All webboards/forums are like this now, IMHO.

it's not substantially worse than normal at the moment.

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

I'm on the current Firefox and it's been unusable for me for about a month. Today is one of the few days it would load. When it does load it's slower than AOL, on dial up, in 1994.

Also whenever I post, I get an error screen, but it does post.

[irishtrek]

When I hit the back button upper left corner of the screen it goes instantly, but If I click on a say Thunderdome it takes several seconds.
Also around here we've has some pretty nice weather lately up into the 70s or 80s and I live in a building just over a hundred years old with no AC and the heat seems to make my laptop run slower than normal.

[FALLINGSTAR]

I kept getting the "too many requests" thing too. The title page loaded but not the forums and today is the 1st day in about a week I've been able to access the forum.

Where's the mods?

[southwestforests]

All webboards/forums are like this now, IMHO.

That 'All' brings to mind things such as,

Google and OpenAI Are Slowing Down Your Website
A Smarter Hosting Fix
March 1, 2025
3 minutes read
https://aijourn.com/google-and-openai-a ... r-website/

The Silent Strain of AI-powered web crawlers.

Artificially intelligent web crawlers are also called bots or spiders and search the web to index content and gather data. Search engine bots like Googlebot have always existed on the internet but AI giants like OpenAI have pushed up crawler activity. These AI bots skim the surface too – they also scrape large amounts of data to feed machine learning models. This deep crawling can unintentionally cause problems.

Increased Bandwidth Consumption

Each visit by a crawler uses bandwidth. Some visits from search engine bots are manageable, AI crawlers are more aggressive. This excess traffic may soon exhaust your bandwidth limits – especially on shared hosting plans – and cause throttled performance or overage charges.

Overloading servers and performance lag

AI bots may send thousands of requests in a row and overload servers. That leads to slower page load times / timeouts / and sometimes full site outages. For small to mid-sized websites on shared or virtual private server hosting, this is disastrous.

‘Grey bots’ inundating websites to feed genAI
Real users crowded out as automated agents swarm.
By David Braue on Apr 10 2025 11:43 AM
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/-gre ... genai.html

Between December and the end of February alone, Barracuda reports, the Anthropic-owned ClaudeBot lodged up to 2.5 million requests for data in a day – with one application seeing more than 9.7 million requests in a month, and another fielding over 500,000 in a day.

The volume of requests remained relatively consistent over the course of a day, with an average of around 17,000 requests per hour, suggesting that the grey bots were running at a steady pace to find and download whatever data they could come across.

This is far more measured than the traffic floods created by bad bots, which a recent analysis found account for over a third of Australia’s Internet traffic as they pummel popular sites to snag choice concert tickets, harvest personal data, and commit ad fraud.

Yet “both scenarios – constant bombardment or unexpected, ad hoc traffic surges – present challenges for web applications,” Barracuda senior principal software engineer Rahul Gupta noted, with copyright, privacy and other legal issues only the tip of the iceberg.

...

With AI giants and startups introducing new genAI scrapers on a regular basis – and many using sneaky tactics to avoid detection – managing their impact remains a cat-and-mouse game.

Grey bots threaten to crowd out legitimate users as they inundate servers with requests for data, often ignoring website owners’ requests, using a widespread method called the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) and its robots.txt file, to move the bots on.

Bots now account for over half of all internet traffic
News
By Sead Fadilpašić
published 16 April 2025
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/ ... et-traffic

With the proliferation of Generative AI, things are only going to get worse, Imperva further states. ByteSpider Bot alone is apparently responsible for more than half (54%) of all AI-enabled attacks. Other significant contributors include AppleBot (26%), ClaudeBot (13%), and ChatGPT User Bot (6%).

Not all bot traffic is malicious, though. There are many useful, and often essential bots, such as search engine crawlers, monitoring bots, social media bots, or data scraping bots. They are used to index websites for search engines, check websites for performance or downtime, schedule posts or respond automatically, or to aggregate sites and scrape valuable data.

Still, bad bots take up a hefty portion of all bot traffic, presenting a real challenge for the cybersecurity community.

These tools, whose popularity exploded roughly three years ago with the introduction of Chat-GPT, have simplified the creation and scaling of malicious bots, Imperva noted.

Mike Elgan
by Mike Elgan
Contributing Columnist

Inside the war between genAI and the internet
opinion
Mar 28, 20256 mins
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... ernet.html

While much digital ink has been spilled decrying the taking of content, it’s also important to know that the chatbot companies are overwhelming many of the sites they’re copying content from, much like a daily DDOS attack.

[Thom]

And suddenly it's acting normal* again. At least for me. Go figure...


*as normal goes nowadays.

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

Yeah working normal for me.

[irishtrek]

Same here.

[FALLINGSTAR]

So far.

[Thom]

Beware the things that fix themselves...

[EVApodman]

For a while it seemed that something was overwhelming the server, making requests so it was almost impossible for us to get through. What happens when crucial sites are overwhelmed by the bots and the average person can't get through?

[irishtrek]

Beware the things that fix themselves...

LIke a doctor operating on themselves or a lawyer on trial representing themselves, either one bad idea.