Slow Forum
 

Hi!
Is anyone else experiencing a slow forum these last couple weeks? I use Tapatalk on my phone, which is sometimes slow, but I tried the forum on my computer today, and it was equally slow.

Thanks!

Sent from my SM-S931U using Tapatalk

Yes. I have been having the same problem and it is very annoying.

Yes. Very much so!!! Everything else is running normally so it must be a problem with the host site.

Same using the website but just noticed it yesterday.

Yes, something is wrong. Takes forever to open and then forever to open a thread.

yep. i've gotten the "connection timed out/too slow to respond" message a couple of times too. glad its not just me!

It took me so long to try and post this post, I decided to not do it.

It takes $$ to run this forum. The "donate" tab is in the top banner. Just a suggestion.

Alan

Oh, that does not work either.

certificate error
 

Since the last Win 11 upgrade, I have been getting certificate errors when loading the website. I don't have that problem on Ubuntu.

Thank you Webmaster
 

Thanks Webmaster. Now back to normal.

Dave

It appears to be normal now, yes.

Sent from my SM-S931U using Tapatalk

Still seems very slow........

agree - its very slow as opposed to before it was glacially slow and unusable...

It's Back, Yay
 

Wow. Glad winnipesakee.com is back. From my recent perspective, it wasn't slow, it was just GONE.

GLAD IT'S BACK!

It should work a lot better now.

The problem has actually been growing for months and was caused by the huge amount of bots that were hitting the site. Bots have always been busy indexing the site for the search engines but recently they have become a much bigger problem for forums and other comment boards. This site runs on a modest server and just couldn't handle the volume. The bots couldn't post since they had to be registered but they could still repeatedly access posts and threads and try to register. At times there were 20,000 visitors or more showing on the site when less than a hundred were actual people. In recent weeks this finally maxed out the server.

I recently had to stop accepting new registrations with Gmail addresses. The bots were almost all using gmail addresses when registering. I screen new memberships and sometimes there would be hundreds of new registrations with gmail addresses waiting for review. I hope that will now slow down so I can resume taking Gmail registrations.

All the site traffic is now being routed through a service which detects and blocks most malicious bots. The overall bot traffic is now down about 75%. It's making a big difference right now but time will tell.

Sorry the site was so slow.

Don

No worries, Don, and thanks for the explanation—everything seems good right now. [emoji110][emoji3577]

Sent from my SM-S931U using Tapatalk

No apologies needed. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for you. Running a couple of FB groups is hard enough trying to keep the bots out. Too bad there wasn't a way they could be detected. It's gotten so we don't trust much on the net any more.

Hmmm...I wonder if that's AI?

Slow Again
 

Site seems to be slowing down again. It’s was fine for a couple days but definitely noticed today that it is slowing down again…

Dan

OK Now
 

Now it seems OK!

Dan

slow again...
 

Took over two minutes to load the forum, subforum, and then this thread in order to post this message. Time for the bot-purge again or whatever was done last time...

Was fast just now (5:40 AM, while my fam sleeps!), but I'm guessing these attacks come and go.

Sent from my SM-S931U using Tapatalk

Mine was very slow too but just now opened up as it should.

Not a big deal...
 

Not a big deal... Just take a sip or two of iced tea, or another cup of coffee, or ....

Life's too short to worry about the small stuff.

Dave

At about 8:30 this am Chrome gave me a message that "Site not available" "Too long a time to load." Just logged in at 11:20 am, all OK.

Bad, then good, then bad, then good for me too.

Just now (4pm Tuesday), after a couple more weeks of failure due to timing out, suddenly we have Winni forum again! This time I got a screen (quickly, and going away quickly on its own), saying it was checking to see if I were a real person (albeit with gradually fading intelligence), rather than an AI-based intruder. I suspect webmaster will be along to say something to address this site-theft has been installed. Perhaps he shouldn't say just was installed (if so), and not help the attackers figure out how to hack that tool.