WTF! ADS

[scattergun]

So for over a week I couldn’t get on this site and now that it’s back their are ADs on the main page that you can’t get rid of and then they have to verify that I’m human to get anywhere else on this site! WHAT THE FUDGE!

[Peter Barton]

The site was being attacked by a bot network - they're attacking pretty much every phpBB they can find (scraping the data to train AI models). They were hitting the site so often, it stopped working. It unfortunately took a while to narrow it down to the board being attacked, my hosting support isn't very good - I'll be migrating this all to another host in the near future. The "human" challenge is unfortunately necessary, about two thirds of the traffic is still from the bot network.

The ads I noticed as well (it's not something I changed), I'm going to look into it and see if I can disable it. I put google ads on the site years ago to help cover some of the costs - they haven't paid me anything in years now, and claim my site config isn't correct - yet the ads still show, and now this. So I'll be shutting those off when I can.

FYI, here's an illustration of the bot network traffic (orange) vs the human traffic (the barely visible blue line at the bottom)

Screenshot 2025-05-16 at 9.13.07 am.png (213.71 KiB) Viewed 6 times

[scattergun]

Thank you for explaining this.