Site Performance!

[Archie]

I know the site performance has been poor this week. We've been down more than usual and it has often been slow. Today we were down most of the day. There was a big surge in traffic this week (mostly bots). That could be the problem. Or it could be some other server thing. I have not had much time to look into it, but I will investigate over the weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Nazgul]

I know the site performance has been poor this week. We've been down more than usual and it has often been slow. Today we were down most of the day. There was a big surge in traffic this week (mostly bots). That could be the problem. Or it could be some other server thing. I have not had much time to look into it, but I will investigate over the weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In total there are 1850 users online. Most of those are bots. The way to solve this as we did at RODOH is to allow guests to access only the front page, but alter the permissions to read the rest to authenticated members. This is also why skeptics went down. All AI nonsense.

[Archie]

I know the site performance has been poor this week. We've been down more than usual and it has often been slow. Today we were down most of the day. There was a big surge in traffic this week (mostly bots). That could be the problem. Or it could be some other server thing. I have not had much time to look into it, but I will investigate over the weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In total there are 1850 users online. Most of those are bots. The way to solve this as we did at RODOH is to allow guests to access only the front page, but alter the permissions to read the rest to authenticated members. This is also why skeptics went down. All AI nonsense.

We should be able to handle a good deal of traffic. A couple thousand users in and of itself is not such a big deal. We've had the bots for a long time, and they have not caused too many issues in the past. The bots are certainly overactive, so I will look for ways to curb them just a bit but without doing anything drastic. I really want to keep the site 100% publicly viewable/lurker friendly, and I also want all of the forum content to be in big tech/AI databases.

[Stubble]

In the past week I've noticed large volume of DDoS activity across multiple websites.

If I were to venture a guess, I'd say it is a result of freed up gub'ment monies to fight 'online hate'.

Even kiwifarms caught some of it. They went down briefly around the same time CODOH Forum was basically 'knocked offline'.

One good mitigation technique is to use a 'cryptographic challenge'. Cloudflare offers this as a service and Stormfront uses it on occasion. There is a trust issue however, because the process has potential to make cloudflare a 'man in the middle' and give them a lot of information about who is making the connection.

Kiwifarms developed their own 'cryptographic challenge' and named it 'kiwiflare' and that completely removes the concern.

They didn't do it for privacy however. They did it because during the 'Keffles Kerfuffle', cloudflare dropped their protection (shortly before underhandedly seizing their web domain and removing their service completely from the internet). [Apparently the only community more dangerous to the first amendment than the 'tribe' is gender dysphoric sociopaths with time on their hands, connections in tech and an axe wound to grind, I mean dilate]

Like it or not, as CODOH Forum grows, it becomes a 'front line' position in the fight for online freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of information, freedom of assembly.

This place, it will be attacked. The attacks will not stop. As 'antisemitism' laws get on the books and discussion in general about any sensitive subject concerning one specific sub group of persons becomes criminalized (as it already did under the Soviet and as it unfolds in the EU step by step) the target will only be painted brighter.

This unfortunate reality is what I see from my vantage. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

By volume, the DDoS attacks appeared to be coming out of South Dakota when I looked at various 'DDoS' maps the other day.

To see if my hunch pans out, you could look at the traffic and see if it originated there.

Maybe my tinfoil hat is too damn tight.

[HansHill]

Kudos to the mod team for getting the forum back up and running.

My tinfoil hat is pinching me too, Mr Stubble - it's times like this with so much uncertainty around the future of the net, that I am urging the posters here to be smart and create multiple backups and archives of all the material you are likely to need. Aim for having backups and redundancy. It can be something as basic as an old clunker spinning metal HDD, or a full RAID array, or ideally both.

I have a downloaded copy of the old forum archived and I can access it with an indexing tool as per one of the stickied posts, if the mods haven't already made arrangements, perhaps a backup (or series of backups) of the new forum is in order.

**Edit**

The best time to start archiving is yesterday. The second best time is today!

[Stubble]

My tinfoil hat is pinching me too, Mr Stubble - it's times like this with so much uncertainty around the future of the net, that I am urging the posters here to be smart and create multiple backups and archives of all the material you are likely to need. Aim for having backups and redundancy. It can be something as basic as an old clunker spinning metal HDD, or a full RAID array, or ideally both.

I highly recommend a RAID. I also highly recommend a series of micro sd cards.

For a RAID for data, I recommend a lightweight linux distro, running it 'in a jar' (not online), using older, cheaper, abundant hardware.

Going back to micro sd, I just can't see a reason not to keep using them like 3.5" floppies.

[Callafangers]

My tinfoil hat is pinching me too, Mr Stubble - it's times like this with so much uncertainty around the future of the net, that I am urging the posters here to be smart and create multiple backups and archives of all the material you are likely to need. Aim for having backups and redundancy. It can be something as basic as an old clunker spinning metal HDD, or a full RAID array, or ideally both.

I highly recommend a RAID. I also highly recommend a series of micro sd cards.

For a RAID for data, I recommend a lightweight linux distro, running it 'in a jar' (not online), using older, cheaper, abundant hardware.

Going back to micro sd, I just can't see a reason not to keep using them like 3.5" floppies.

For anyone able to assist with the above, this is the tool I used to archive (and ultimately resurrect) the old CODOH forum we have available through the present forum:

https://www.httrack.com/

It isn't perfect (tends to miss some of the middle pages in very long threads of more than 26+ pages [at least on the old forum -- only captured the first and last 13 of each for some reason]) but does a really good job overall at capturing the exact structure, links, etc.

I'd recommend it for any website you want to back-up, so long as its available publicly. But still important to save specific contributions, just in case the backup fails for whatever reason.

[EDIT: As you're setting up a website 'scraping', you have to do a few things:

- Specify the Project name, etc (whatever you want to call it)
- Indicate the parent URL for which you want to scrape everything within (e.g. if you put https://www.codoh.com/, then it will scrape the ENTIRE CODOH site; whereas if you put https://www.codoh.com/articles/, you would only get everything within the /articles/ subdirectory.
- If you run into errors, you might want to change the browser header (e.g. Mozilla, etc.) as this is basically the browser that the software 'pretends' to be while scraping, which can make it harder for websites to detect and block.
- There is a settings page where you can indicate which file types you'd like to include in the scraping. I usually add *.pdf but you can decide what to include
- I think that's mainly it...? There is also an option to ignore 'robots.txt' but that's slightly controversial for some websites. 'robots.txt' is kind of a website's way of telling web scrapers what webpages that are 'not supposed to' or 'not allowed' to scrape, however these can simply be ignored (allowing a total scraping, where possible) but that could raise questions about copyright or just good manners, etc.]

[HansHill]

Thanks CF i will attempt this when I get a bit of time and report back. I might try omit the Debate forum to keep the archive tight and clutter-free from the inane blathering.