Did we get hacked?

[Elisabetta]

What's going on with this site? It's running super slow and having a very hard time loading the site or even commenting on posts. It's been this way off and on for awhile to the point most days you can't get online at all.

[Mouse]

I know the "Most ever users" was hit yesterday. And 800 users at the moment seems more than usual.

In total there are 812 users online :: 5 registered, 1 hidden and 806 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1707 on Thu May 01, 2025 2:27 am

I have also been in contact with other members who are having problems in accessing the site.

[Elisabetta]

I know the "Most ever users" was hit yesterday. And 800 users at the moment seems more than usual.

In total there are 812 users online :: 5 registered, 1 hidden and 806 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1707 on Thu May 01, 2025 2:27 am

I have also been in contact with other members who are having problems in accessing the site.

It's working for now but I'm sure it will mess up again because it works for a day then goes back to not working. Moons been trying to access this all day and I was just able to fully load the site without it kicking me off saying sever interruption.

[stephanie53]

I've had a very hard time even trying to download the main page all day. This was the first time i was able to get on to the site. It's now 23:07 hrs may 1

[Seb]

I don't think we've been hacked, but I belive we have been on the receiving end of a denial of service attack or some search engine bot trawl.

The number of guests visiting the site have been extremely high, I saw over 1500 concurrently active guests two days ago, that is active within 5min.

[Uncle Al]

Where I'm located, I tried to open the cafe' around 11PM on 30 April.
Page wouldn't load. It's now 3:52AM on 2 May. For me, the Cafe' was
down 26 hours.

I don't know what's wrong unless the site was overloaded with 'guests'.
Only time will tell.

I spend most of May 1st getting ready for a memorial service for
a friend of 30+ years. I played 2 songs at his service.
Not used to a piano anymore
The "touch" is MUCH HARDER than playing an organ.

You know, there are friends and there's family and
then there are friends who become like family.

Uncle Al

[crfriend]

This looks like a repeat of the incident we had a few weeks ago -- and it smells like load on the server, or on the database-server. Last time it cleared up on its own,

[crfriend]

This looks like a repeat of the incident we had a few weeks ago -- and it smells like load on the server, or on the database-server. Last time it cleared up on its own,

[Jim]

I've rarely been able to load a page in the last few days.

[Mouse]

When the number of users at the bottom of the main page is a few...

In total there are 13 users online :: 4 registered, 1 hidden and 8 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1707 on Thu May 01, 2025 2:27 am

The site works fine. If the users online is 900 or so, the site doesn't work.

I am not sure who the 900 users are of if skirts for men is suddenly popular, but the server is obviously set up for a reasonable number of users.

[crfriend]

800 users online at once is unimaginable for me, so it's likely down to a DDOS of some sort. So, that's a simple load problem. I'm not sure how we can defend against it, either. I need to give this some thought -- which is difficult now because of the pain I'm in.

[crfriend]

Well, I've got some analysis done and have changed the maximum session-length from a day to three hours.

I also note a vast number of sessions from "wowrack.com" and from "Alibaba Cloud" -- which tends to be in agreement with my initial (and possibly hasty) judgment. I seem to recall trouble with "wowrack" a few years ago and they went into a ban-list that kept them from ever getting more than an
ACCESS DENIED" message; they may go back in that list, along w/Alibaba" netblocks if the problem persists and we keep getting licked off the air,

[Elisabetta]

Finally loading. I was beginning to wonder. So glad I'm able to load with no issues so far today. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

[rode_kater]

Another site I visit has had similar issues in the recent past. It looks like bots scanning the site to gather data for LLM training purposes. They're usually pretty dumb bots that ignore any and all methods to tell them to bugger off. The robots.txt for example (though this site doesn't use that).

They tried various countermeasures but it's not so easy. The best way is if you can somehow detect anonymous traffic vs active users at an HTTP level (in the cookies for example) and implement rate limiting for anonymous users only. That way you can limit the impact for the real users. These bots aren't usually going to create an account (though some bots do that too....)

[Uncle Al]

I tried to post this earlier this morning -

Either we're getting a lot of publicity or the world has gone mad

From the bottom of the 'home' page at 3:38AM CDT, 03 May, 2025:

In total there are 1088 users online :: 6 registered, 0 hidden and
1082 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1707 on 30 Apr 2025, 21:27

This is getting scary

Uncle Al