Page 5 of 5

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Wed May 28, 2025 10:31 am
by BigBird
All Good Here! Thanks

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Wed May 28, 2025 11:59 am
by phoo
Cool. Thanks, everyone. I'll cautiously declare victory. Sorry it took so long to get it worked out, but this is outside of my skillset. My day job is *breaking* servers, not keeping them up, so this is all new to me. I appreciate your patience.


Thanks,

~Patrick

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2025 1:46 pm
by phoo
Just to bump this thread now that the site has been working well for almost a month, here's a graph of the traffic to the site from the last 30 days, according to Cloudflare. The giant hills on the left is the traffic that was hitting the site before I finally figured out the proper countermeasures. The dips were from me trying different things that didn't really work, as the bots figured out how to bypass them. The smooth, low-level lines are the traffic we've been sustaining in a consistent basis now that the bad bots are gone. Yay!
damnriders-traffichistory.png
damnriders-traffichistory.png (77 KiB) Viewed 2144 times
Hopefully, the fix holds. I've been trying to be sure to check in on the site daily, but if anyone notices any issues please don't hesitate to let me know.


Thanks,

~Patrick

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2025 7:05 pm
by Bucho
Good work

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2025 10:30 pm
by Purple Haze
Thanks for all your hard work.

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2025 12:24 am
by phoo
Thanks. I'm just sharing because I find data fun, and it's nice to see stuff is actually working like it's supposed to.


~Patrick

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2025 8:22 am
by kos1
Those are satisfying charts, nice work. Did you end up going with the paid version of Cloudflare?

Let us know if we can kick in some $$ for a bot defense (or beer) fund.

Re: Troubles with the site

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2025 9:10 am
by phoo
We're still on the free tier of Cloudflare and it seems to be doing what it needs to. I'll never refuse a free beer, but it's definitely not necessary and you guys already give me plenty. It's nice to be giving back to you all. Like I said before, I'm glad that I'm finally actually using this server that I've been paying for since 2000. I was honestly nervous it wasn't going to be up for the task.

But anyway, I'll stop bumping this thread because *hopefully* (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, sacrifices a chicken) the site will be smooth sailing from here on out!


Thanks,

~Patrick