Slow Forum

[webmaster]

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