You may have noticed that when opening and browsing this site you'll now occasionally see a splash page which shows that a security check is verifying that you are a "human", and not a BOT or other automated attacker. You may also start to see this security page on other sites as they are forced to add this protection. This IS NOT a malicious page or sign of a virus infection. It is the opposite. It is a security service from Cloudflare with tools to stop the
BOTS and
DDoS attacks that have at times slowed this site to a crawl.
When I first added Cloudflare a few weeks ago I enabled a low level of protection and it seemed to work good enough to reduce the BOTS and make the site functional again. Apparently the BOTS found a way around that protection and by last weekend the site was often unusable.
This image below from a few minutes ago shows how dramatic the BOT attacks were. The normal amount of visitors on the site is a few hundred (140 right now) yet at 2:45 AM on the 1st the forum counted over 33,000 visitors. At that time of day there are usually only a few people on the site. Almost all of the 33,000 visitors were BOTS and the server couldn't handle the load.
I've now maxed out the protection and it is working very well. The loads on the server caused by the bots have now returned to normal. I'm still learning about the tools I have available through Cloudflare and may make some adjustments to see what their effect is. It has a setting to allow what they've identified as "safe" BOTS like legitimate search engines. I'm going to try that and see what happens. I'll try not to mess anything up! :-)
Don