[Mark]

Ah! I think I have found the issue.

There is an old ban in place with the reason "General forum disruption" and it had lots of IPs set to trigger it. It seems back then I mistakenly added some Cloudflare IPs on the list too. So when your IP failed to record, you were probably seen as being inside the Cloudflare network behind one of those banned IPs which should not be banned at all.

Thanks for letting me know. You hopefully shouldn't get that again if I now re-activate Cloudflare.

[Mark]

Oh yeah - forgot the website uses a certificate issued by Cloudflare so me temporarily disabling it probably caused that.

Anyway, I believe I have removed all the mistaken IPs and have therefore now re-activated Cloudflare, so that error should go away when you clear your cache

[Mark]

Sorry for the downtime issues today. There was sporadic slow loading and crashing earlier. And I subsequently had an engineer try and make improvements to the server setup which caused some further downtime in the process.

[moonglow]

Sorry for the downtime issues today. There was sporadic slow loading and crashing earlier. And I subsequently had an engineer try and make improvements to the server setup which caused some further downtime in the process.

Ok thanks Mark.

[Aileen]

I'm glad you found another so quickly.  Hope the migration process goes smoothly.

[moonglow]

I realise there are still issues here. I've now found a new provider and am in the process of preparing to migrate over to them. Hopefully can happen this week.

Thank you Mark, I know how hard you always work.

[Mark]

I put a pause on the migration to a new server. I discovered in the logs that during the crashes and slow downs, the server was being brute force attacked from China (primarily). It's a disappointing the "engineers" didn't notice this themselves.

The attackers left some footprints that have allowed me to take some fairly effective counter-measures (since Thursday). So I'm hoping this will solve the issue. At least if it happens again, I know where to look first.

The silver lining to all this is I've looked through everything very closely and found ways to optimise various things in the code and the server.  For example, the recently discussed backup induced unavailability during the early hours -- that should be significantly reduced now. I might also be able to reduce the server costs based on some of these improvements.

Anyway, I'm hoping this is resolved now but it will be a waiting game until I can be sure this was the cause.

[Mark]

The attacker themselves might not be from China but could be just using compromised machines there. They have also used Amazon cloud servers too.

They tried again yesterday. I think they'll give up soon enough as my response requires minimal effort and yet is very effective but I suspect the effort to circumvent would require quite a bit more effort.  By the way, they have not been successful at all in their endeavours.