If anyone reading this is real, and you've been trying to use the site over the past few months, then you probably noticed that the site has been up and down like a yo-yo. The site has been targeted by hundreds of thousands of IPs each day hitting the same URLs over and over, as well as the usual crap that website receives. I haven't been keeping an eye on it much as it's pretty much dead, but there are other sites on the same server that I manage and they've been affected badly too. So, a few changes have had to be made.
First up is a large scale ban by IP origin country. I've had to block most of the Middle East and Asia, India, China, much of Africa, Russia, and chunks of South America. These accounted for about 75% of the malicious traffic to the site, so trying to keep on top of it via small blocks of IP addresses just wasn't feasible. Now most of it is from the US and Canada, but I'm blocking out chunks of those by hosting company, and implemented some automatic blocks based on the URLs being requested as there's a pretty common format to them; 90%+ of the crap seems to very similar, spread over masses of IP addresses all requesting the same URLs over and over, at one point hundreds per second. With a bit of luck the algorithms I've put in place will settle things down a bit for now, but longer term it won't help much. It'll still slow down or not respond as it tries to recover from being pummelled, but hopefully will come back after a few minutes rather than hours or days like it has been.
I'm planning on putting the site behind a content delivery system like CloudFlare to have their systems automatically filter out most of the crap, as their systems are far better at that than me trying to put plugs in the giant swiss cheese of the internet pushing the site onto it's knees. I may also massively overhaul the site; move to the latest version of phpBB or move to something else, and a more modern gallery system, but that may mean some stuff disappears as this site is so hacked and customised it's not possible to keep it all. A complete UI overhaul too, with an interface that will work well on a phone, tablet, or PC. Unfortunately over the years images from the gallery have gone missing, I'm hoping to maybe recover from some old backups but I'm not sure how practical that will be.
Does anyone still visit here? Post up a reply saying "Me!" or "I'm still here!", or something along those lines. If there's little interest then I may just pull the plug instead, I post on various Facebook groups but don't use any forums any more including AoS - I posted a bit near Christmas about the Realms of Battle board but I haven't posted anything about the Death Korps and Aeldari I've painted (yes, moi, painting
). I'm also often too tired of an evening or weekend to even think about hacking a website together after doing a week of work writing masses of code, and prefer to watch some TV and then join up with friends online to play some co-op games; War Thunder has taken a bit of a break, currently playing Bellwright and might well start up Dune Awakening again with a self-hosted server, and some Windrose when the next biome is released.
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