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Forum loading issues?
- Thread starter Ashley Hill
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RailUK Forums
Andy Pacer
Established Member
Agreed, terribly slow this morning. Almost unusable.
Kite159
Veteran Member
Agreed there
DelW
Established Member
- Joined
- 15 Jan 2015
- Messages
- 5,934
I've found the latter annoying for a while too, especially as for me, the pop-up box gets in the way of the forum navigation line.
But as of now, it's not appearing, and posts are loading quickly. The stats page is showing 'only' 1300 visitors, which may be helping, or maybe our admins have got on top of the issue - well done if so!
Andy Pacer
Established Member
Seems to be a lot more responsive now.
eastwestdivide
Established Member
Is this the best place to report problems? Is there a more direct route to our mods/admins?
Generally speaking the best option is to use the "Contact Us" button at the bottom of every page. Sometimes for something a little more general and widespread (like the current issue) there's no harm in a thread but outside of those sorts of situations (and certainly for something which is only impacting on you) the "Contact Us" button is the way to go. If for no other reason than we don't read everything posted so can easily miss things like this thread!
eastwestdivide
Established Member
Thought as much. Thanks
Xenophon PCDGS
Veteran Member
Very slow in responding at 0300 on Tuesday, 28th july 2026.
Andy Pacer
Established Member
Agreed Pete very slow again at the moment.
Same for me too. There are way too many adverts blocking the forum up.
Apologies - we've had a surge in bot traffic again, which I'm doing my best to mitigate against. The ads issue was unrelated, AdSense decided it wanted to run an experiment without so much as telling us...
Falcon1200
Established Member
Thanks for the update and the response, seems to be OK again now.
Peter Mugridge
Veteran Member
It's slow for me at the moment even on full fibre...
Last night it seemed to be running normally up to about 22.45, then went into snail mode, if that timing helps pinpoint anything.
spyinthesky
Member
I have the same issues having arrived in from work at 23:15. Had a brief spell this morning which was fine and now very slow loading.
Same here, I gave up in the end.
I actually tried using a VPN, that was a bad move - all sorts of warning messages.
Logged in this afternoon and got a server message saying I was banned by the admins for exceeding some sort of limit, went back a page and refreshed and it was OK.
Now its gone all slow again.
edit: its slightly faster now, but still thinking about things when I click something.
Sorry, I've been tinkering a bit! Unfortunately the nature of the attack means Cloudflare is intermittently not coping very well..... but the rate limiting messages should be gone now, that was my fault 
spyinthesky
Member
I don’t think an apology is needed for the stuff you have to go through.Sorry, I've been tinkering a bit! Unfortunately the nature of the attack means Cloudflare is intermittently not coping very well..... but the rate limiting messages should be gone now, that was my fault
Indeed, everything seems hunky-dory now though
brad465
Veteran Member
This must be a record:
(Image of user count at 17:19, showing 14,439 users online)
(Image of user count at 17:19, showing 14,439 users online)
Down to 440 now
Gareth1990
Member
Why would anyone want to target a railway forum? I honestly can’t think of a reason
Yes, today has been particularly bad! After spending a good chunk of my evening so far playing around with rulesets, I think I've found a reasonable compromise.
Almost certainly, we're not specifically being targeted other than we're content-rich so ideal for AI bots to stomp around!
I am hugely against many of the facets of AI, so when rogue, and worse still very stupid, AI bots bring down web sites I manage I am even less endeared to it!
One web site I manage was receiving 10 million requests per day - yes, over 100 per second, from a wide batch of IP addresses in Singapore. Now that might have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, rather than "plain" AI, but the effect is the same. Fortunately after a lot of effort I was able to craft a way to return error 403 (request refused) in a timely manner that didn't use all my site's processing power (which some anti-bot solutions do), and without affecting legitimate users; and after a day or so the attack has abandoned its attempts on my site.
I tried doing some protection via Cloudflare but it didn't help.
A common website-killer is when the incoming requests make a lot of time-expensive database requests, so the site runs out of database access capacity.
(typo corrected)
One web site I manage was receiving 10 million requests per day - yes, over 100 per second, from a wide batch of IP addresses in Singapore. Now that might have been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, rather than "plain" AI, but the effect is the same. Fortunately after a lot of effort I was able to craft a way to return error 403 (request refused) in a timely manner that didn't use all my site's processing power (which some anti-bot solutions do), and without affecting legitimate users; and after a day or so the attack has abandoned its attempts on my site.
I tried doing some protection via Cloudflare but it didn't help.
A common website-killer is when the incoming requests make a lot of time-expensive database requests, so the site runs out of database access capacity.
(typo corrected)
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I don't know if it's necessarily AI, could just be good old-fashioned scrapers.