Railuk Forum issues.

[Rescars]

Not sure if this is the right place to be posting this, so Administrators help please!

Cloudflare purports to be trying to verify that I am human to allow me access to the Railforums site. Confirms I am, but then restarts verification process. So no access is possible currently from my Android tablet. This started last evening and is still continuing. However, access via my Android phone seems to be working fine. Anyone else having a similar experience? Anything I could/should be doing to resolve this issue?

 

[Purple Train]

Not sure if this is the right place to be posting this, so Administrators help please!

Cloudflare purports to be trying to verify that I am human to allow me access to the Railforums site. Confirms I am, but then restarts verification process. So no access is possible currently from my Android tablet. This started last evening and is still continuing. However, access via my Android phone seems to be working fine. Anyone else having a similar experience? Anything I could/should be doing to resolve this issue?

If you can, send this to the admin team via the "Contact us" link at the bottom of the page, and I'm sure someone will be able to help I've had tech issues before and they've been sorted out, so hopefully they'll do something for you!

 

[Mike395]

Apologies, we were the victims of a large scale DDoS attack ourselves on Thursday and the CAPTCHA you're seeing is part of the mitigation for that (I'm assuming you're outside the UK, or using a VPN with a non-UK exit node?).

We'll need to keep that protection in place in the short term; do you have any sort of privacy plugin/feature on your Android device browser perchance that's stopping the Cloudflare cookie being set, and/or a regularly-changing IP address?

 

[MotCO]

Apologies, we were the victims of a large scale DDoS attack ourselves on Thursday

Many thanks for all the hard work you do in the background to ensure we continue to access these pages; most of us were unaware of the cyber attack, and continued to read the posts without interruption.

 

[Rescars]

Many thanks for all your various posts and very well said MotCO. Like others, I was blissfully unaware of any cyberattack. Big thank you to the administrators for all that you do!

As Mike395 guessed, I was outside the UK this week when this issue arose. Not sure what happened, but Cloudflare suddenly decided to accept me as a human after all and all is now well.

 

[jfollows]

Cloudflare’s process sucks big time and affects me frequently for other sites, but not this one, when my computer is otherwise running slow. It’s the wrong solution for some sort of problem.

The problem is that the people who pay Cloudflare aren’t the people who are forced to use them.

 

[Mike395]

(For anyone who noticed an error over the last hour - this was also due to a large scale DDoS, MySQL fell over before the server did on this occasion! Should now be good, mitigations are in place, though non-UK users may see a CAPTCHA on first access to the forum)