There have been some site slowdown issues in the last week. They often appear as the browser negotiating a TLC connection longer than usual, especially on a first connection to the site. This will either take far longer than necessary or timeout. This is unrelated to previous server downtime issues. It may be related to an increase in traffic due to AI bot scraping or similar. I'm working with Rackspace on log analysis as the issue has persisted even while we increase the workers available to processing connection.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and I'll update as we learn and fix more. Thanks for your patience.
UPDATE (2025-12-16): We've blocked multiple Chinese AI scraper bots which ignore robots.txt directives and were effectively engaging in a denial of service attack with YisouSpider being the worst offender. It seems to be helping.
UPDATE (2025-12-20): We've confirmed that YisouSpider and other Chinese AI scraper bots are ignoring robots.txt and switching their user agent to avoid htaccess blocks. We're going to have to do hard blocks by IP address to prevent this Chinese AI bot DDoS.
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The AI scrapping unfortunately is becoming a more prevalent thing. I hope the logs will turn up something. Best of luck on that front!
your friendly neighbourhood ex-Moderator and developer Zach Thibeau
thx for fast reaction and check of my report.
UPDATE confirm issue now. first connection was ok, then on time out border and once over it.
fingers crossed.
see you
i help where i can. maybe you can help me too. see in account/track
I run a forum site, but with a different software, phpBB. The AI scrappers have been a major issue for almost all forum admins this past year.
Not sure if it's helpful, but there a 600+ comment thread on it at phpBB's forum: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2662519
The summery of that thread is that the only really effective, and easy, method of combating this attack is to use Cloudflare with some rules set up.
Here is their Knowledge Base article on setting it up for phpBB but I'm sure it can be adapted for any forum site: https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.3/kb/article/bot-management-with...
As for my personal forum, the guest/bot active user count went from over 2,000 (which was slowing down and ultimately crashing the site) to 5-15 legitimate users and approved bots after implementing Cloudflare.
Hope this helps.
Working with Rackspace, we're now blocking multiple Chinese AI scraper bots that ignore robots.txt. YisouSpider in particular was absolutely slamming us. I'm going to continue to monitor with these changes.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Damn, glad to see something being done and so far seems to be helping, just being able to navigate here felt a little snappier.
your friendly neighbourhood ex-Moderator and developer Zach Thibeau
What we found on most forums (including mine) is that blocking specific bots/ip addresses manually was a cat and mouse game. The scrappers ultimately changed or went to random sets of ip addresses. I hope that blocking a few bots specifically works here, but I would be surprised if that is all it takes for the long term.
If you compare site logs from a year ago to now, you should be able to tell if all all these bots are actually being blocked. Again, I went from say 10 guests on my forum to over 2,000 when AI bots started their attack. Tried specific ip and bot blocks on my server side, which was partially effective where it brought the guest count back down to maybe 200 or so. Made the site functional, but clearly there was abnormal levels of traffic even then compared to previous baseline.
Ultimately, I set up Cloudflare and it was immediately back to baseline of about 10 guests on average and haven't had to touch any settings in months. I have also not heard about any legitimate users who could not access the site.
Oddly, while they use multiple IPs, they do correctly send their proper user agent, so some of our filtering rules are based on that.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
In our case it was random IP addresses originating from multiple countries. Yes, some identified by their user agent, or even ip ranges which were easy to block with putting some simple rules in our root .htaccess file, but ultimately it went well beyond that, and kept changing so it wasn't a "one time, set it and forget it" where we were able to eliminate all the bots.
Again, that was just our scenario (although most phpBB administrators seemed to have the same problem). The server access logs should be able to tell you how well the blocking is going. But just because the site is running at "normal speeds," doesn't mean there aren't AI bots scrapping the site.
FYI - The site is very slow again.
And also reported as being down: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/portableapps.com.html
Glad to see the site stabilizing. Hopefully it can remain that way for a while longer.
your friendly neighbourhood ex-Moderator and developer Zach Thibeau