Website very slow today

[exilecanada]

Website was working fine this morning, tried to open it this afternoon, took around 5 minutes to load. On occasion it wouldn't load and I got a '504 Gateway time out' message. Everything else is working as normal on my PC so I doubt the problem is at my end. Anyone else experiencing similar issues?

[Colburn_Claret]

I've had the same problem all afternoon.
The pages open, but take an age.
Everything else is fine so it must be the site.
Patience is a virtue, the admin do a great job.

[Chester Perry]

feels like it is under attack - why else would there be over 1800 guests viewing on a day like today

[aggi]

feels like it is under attack - why else would there be over 1800 guests viewing on a day like today

Most likely AI bots scraping the site. There was a report recently that bots make up something like 50% of internet traffic now.

[Chester Perry]

Most likely AI bots scraping the site. There was a report recently that bots make up something like 50% of internet traffic now.

When that has happened previously the page view numbers on the longest threads have rocketed - that has not happened today

[No Ney Never]

Yep, proper lame.

[Dark Cloud]

Summut's not reet! (Took me 15 minutes to log in and write that!!)

[Commy]

It says Google (Bot) at the bottom in the who's online. There was another that said Bot but that has now gone.

[HahaYeah]

504 Gateway Time-outs

[Steddyman]

feels like it is under attack - why else would there be over 1800 guests viewing on a day like today

Be 1800 new Espanyol fans.

[Chester Perry]

It says Google (Bot) at the bottom in the who's online. There was another that said Bot but that has now gone.

one or both the Google and Bing bots are almost always active - they operate in a way that does not affect the sites performance - the AI bots (depending on where they are from can (and have been previously) very disruptive. the thing that makes me question whether it is AI though is there is no great surge of view numbers in the thread stats - previously I have seen the MMT for example surge by over 20,000 views in a day when AI bots have been scraping the site - that has not happened today

[Claretnick]

Currently showing over 3000 guests online. It's very strange

[bfcmik]

Down to 126 guests now and the site is working OK, seemingly

[Vegas Claret]

Be 1800 new Espanyol fans.

Given the love in on Twitter it could be !

[Tribesmen]

All back up to speed now .
7 online and 166 guests

[Nonayforever]

I thought that we must have bought Harry Kane and everybody was logging in.

[box_of_frogs]

Did the bots find what they were looking for?

[dibraidio]

It was down to thousands of connections from GPTBot. OpenAI have agreed to respect the blocking text in robots.txt but apparently it is possible that it is another bot pretending to be ChatGPT. The bot has now been added to a blacklist but it took time for the changes to go through. I thought I'd messed up the config changes because I couldn't connect to the server but I think it was all part of the actions of this bot scraping the site. It really is outrageous that these companies take information without permission with no respect for the day to day activity of the sites that they're scraping.

[Row x]

It was down to thousands of connections from GPTBot. OpenAI have agreed to respect the blocking text in robots.txt but apparently it is possible that it is another bot pretending to be ChatGPT. The bot has now been added to a blacklist but it took time for the changes to go through. I thought I'd messed up the config changes because I couldn't connect to the server but I think it was all part of the actions of this bot scraping the site. It really is outrageous that these companies take information without permission with no respect for the day to day activity of the sites that they're scraping.

Well done for sorting it out

I don't know if it's possible, but when it happens again would it be possible to put a short message out on the sites twitter account just so users then know it's not a problem to them individually?

[aggi]

It was down to thousands of connections from GPTBot. OpenAI have agreed to respect the blocking text in robots.txt but apparently it is possible that it is another bot pretending to be ChatGPT. The bot has now been added to a blacklist but it took time for the changes to go through. I thought I'd messed up the config changes because I couldn't connect to the server but I think it was all part of the actions of this bot scraping the site. It really is outrageous that these companies take information without permission with no respect for the day to day activity of the sites that they're scraping.

Another forum I'm on has made everything inaccessible if you're not logged in because the load from bots was getting too much.

[Steddyman]

Well done for sorting it out

I don't know if it's possible, but when it happens again would it be possible to put a short message out on the sites twitter account just so users then know it's not a problem to them individually?

The site has a twitter account?

[Clovius Boofus]

Another forum I'm on has made everything inaccessible if you're not logged in because the load from bots was getting too much.

You don't have to go that far. Site techies/admin can block Googlebots and other web crawlers/scalpers while keeping the site open to lurkers.

[Rosehill Claret]

The site has a twitter account?

https://x.com/utccom

[ClaretTony]

The issues were beyond me and I reported them to dibraidio yesterday afternoon, probably around 6 pm when I couldn't get the article online that has just gone on. He saw the issue immediately but it couldn't be resolved immediately.

I wasn't so sure we'd be up and running this morning but it has either been resolved or the problem has gone away.

As spotted, the number of visitors had gone through the roof.

[SlidingTackle]

Thanks for sorting all. As suggested, when the dire warning message came up, as I'm IT illiterate, I obviously thought it was an issue at my end; that it was my laptop that was under attack! Phew!

Like being reunited with an old, informative, but argumentative, friend!

[ClaretTony]

Thanks for sorting all. As suggested, when the dire warning message came up, as I'm IT illiterate, I obviously thought it was an issue at my end; that it was my laptop that was under attack! Phew!

Like being reunited with an old, informative, but argumentative, friend!

I always think it's me when there is an issue. I try other websites (they work), I try UTC on my phone without the WiFi (UTC doesn't work) and I message someone to ask if they can get in to UTC (they can't) and only then do I suspect a problem.

[aggi]

You don't have to go that far. Site techies/admin can block Googlebots and other web crawlers/scalpers while keeping the site open to lurkers.

Lots of the bots don't respect the instructions to not scrape and reappear from different IP addresses so very difficult to block. The forum I'm thinking of was run by someone high up in engineering at Cloudflare so obviously more aware than most of this kind of thing.

[ecc]

Many thanks dibraidio and Tony.

[bfcmik]

Being an oldtimer, I have no idea what a scraper can or cannot pickup from a site. Has any personal information such as email or IP addresses been taken?