Troubles with the site

[phoo]

All --

My apologies for the site being down. I don't know when it went down, just that it was down when I visited Monday morning and I didn't get a chance to complain to GoDaddy until the evening and obviously now it's up, but since I don't visit the site every day, I'm concerned that I don't know how long it was down. Several of you already have my cell phone number. If you see the site down, please text me so I can complain and get it fixed. What's frustrating is that nothing has changed on our end in a very long time, and I pay for the "extended service" (as did Ken), and yet we randomly have outages. I need to set aside some time to finally get this site moved over to my other server. It should hopefully be more stable (and save me $30/mo ;) ), but no guarantees on when I'll get that finished.

If you're a regular user and don't have my number, please reach out to me by direct message and I'll be happy to provide it so you can let me know. I'm just not going to post it here on a public post for obvious reasons.


Thanks,

~Patrick

[Bucho]

All --

My apologies for the site being down. I don't know when it went down, just that it was down when I visited Monday morning and I didn't get a chance to complain to GoDaddy until the evening and obviously now it's up, but since I don't visit the site every day, I'm concerned that I don't know how long it was down. Several of you already have my cell phone number. If you see the site down, please text me so I can complain and get it fixed. What's frustrating is that nothing has changed on our end in a very long time, and I pay for the "extended service" (as did Ken), and yet we randomly have outages. I need to set aside some time to finally get this site moved over to my other server. It should hopefully be more stable (and save me $30/mo ;) ), but no guarantees on when I'll get that finished.

If you're a regular user and don't have my number, please reach out to me by direct message and I'll be happy to provide it so you can let me know. I'm just not going to post it here on a public post for obvious reasons.


Thanks,

~Patrick

I think it had been for a day or two. Ill text next time I notice.

[phoo]

And on that note, the site's having SQL issues today. I already went through their AI help and just now finally got a response from a live person (I think). That's one window. On the other, I'm installing phpBB on my own hosting service to see if I can get the site working over there and off of GoDaddy.


~Patrick

[phoo]

I think I've identified the problem. I'm identifying a fix.

In total there are 2872 users online :: 2 registered, 0 hidden and 2870 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 7880 on Sun May 11, 2025 10:42 am

Tons of "guests." I don't know what they are. Certainly bots, could be crawlers. Note that a captcha may be coming. I'm going to see how to only require captchas for guests and not logged in users.

In other news, I still have to copy the database over so existing users and posts still work, but I already have our beloved theme working on my other server.


Thanks,

~Patrick

[juddspaintballs]

[phoo]

Okay, this is the site moved over to my server. It needs testing and verification. Thanks.

[juddspaintballs]

Looks good on my end.

[phoo]

Okay, so the site is moved over to my server. And it's intermittently slow as dirt. Maybe more than intermittently. I'm still investigating. It may just be that the site has tons of cruft that needs to be cleared out, but I still think it's related to the "guest" users since the site runs fast from its "alternative entry point" (giggity).


Thanks,

~Patrick

[phoo]

In fact, if you wanted to hit the site fast and reliably, you can access it from damnriders[dot]xmoto[dot]net (trying to avoid the bots) . It uses the same database. Posts from there and DAMNriders.org both show up on the other because the issue isn't with the database; it's with the number of php (web) processes.


Thanks,

~Patrick

[phoo]

The current "solution" (adding "/DAMN" to the url) is sub-optimal, but hopefully it'll at least allow the site to work for now. There are a bunch of bots and crawlers out there that are hammering people's sites; we aren't alone. I've found forum posts from others who are also dealing with this issue, and I found one that has some code changes that look promising. But for right now, please accept my apologies at the hassle, and hopefully this at least keeps the board up while a more long-term solution is reached.


Thanks,

~Patrick