Test post with attachments - SOMEONE PLEASE **** WITH THE FORUM!

[Lee Roberts]

Have attachments now stopped working properly?

[Lee Roberts]

Another...

[grain_r]

Hey Lee I have been getting Database errors when opening the site just incase it is linked, I assumed it was due to an update. but you have bigger things to deal with by the looks of it. Take care and I hope its a quick recovery. Thanks Rob.

[Muzzer]

Yes, me too for the last 2-3 days(?). Seems intermittent. Working now - nobody move suddenly!!

[Lee Roberts]

Thanks guys, will be sending an update out soon via email, thanks for baring with me, they are the only pics I had on my phone I could use to test attachments... But quite relevant, I need to send you all at least 2 different emails, one about me and then one about the site...

[Lee Roberts]

Just to give you a bit more info etc, the forum gets influxes of "bot traffic" we've also had some denial of service attacks previously that I managed to iron out thanks to Clive letting me know there was a problem etc...

But, generally the "ddos" type database errors we get/see regularly are what's known as kind of false-positives, we're still getting bots, search engine's and normal traffic to the site, and these all count as a slot or more accurately a session in the "session" table of the forum database, however these numbers are manageable and not in the HUGE numbers we would typically see from an orchestrated DDOS type attack.

For instance, Alibaba likes to hit the forum with anything from 10k - 20k visits at a time on occasion, these "visits" can go on for days sometimes, and on the last really big one Clive helped me with, i ended up just blocking the whole of Hong-Kong as a country from visiting the forum in the end and as the long term "fix".

There is a couple of problems now going forward:

1.
The forum software is now well and truly out of date and way over 10 years old, the way the forum software works is that there is a special bit of code in the footer of every page, as YOU as individuals (including me) visit the forum, that special bit of code triggers when the footer for each and every page is loaded, here is the code:

<!-- Do not remove cronimage or your scheduled tasks will cease to function -->
<img src="https://www.mycncuk.com/cron.php?rand=1750788613" alt="" width="1" height="1" border="0" />
<!-- Do not remove cronimage or your scheduled tasks will cease to function -->

...When this some actions behind the scenes known as cron jobs, they're not cron jobs in the typical form that you get on a linux-based operating system (aka Scheduled Tasks) where you have the ability to set them up to run based on times and dates, but rather The ones related to The forum are similar in nature that they carry out whatever tasks you would like however, they rely on....

great i just spent 40 mins typing, used some formatting in my text so hit "Preview Post" to see how it looked and got a 403 page error resulting in me losing half of what i had typed out....

I'm fed up with the forum software now, i'm not re doing what i typed, i'll be in contact with you all in soon, i think i'm just going to make a video and upload it as i have quite a bit to say etc.

regretfully, Lee

[m_c]

Lee, send us DM/Email if you want.

[Lee Roberts]

Cheers m_c,

Quick heads up then: If you’ve experienced any issues accessing the forum lately (especially database connection errors), I’ve posted a full explanation of what’s been going on and what I’ve done to fix it here:

Link:

In short, we’ve been dealing with a flood of automated traffic that caused the session system to clog up, but I’ve now implemented DNS-level filtering and a proper hourly server cron task to keep things running smoothly from here on out.

Thanks for sticking with it, sorry for the messy post above I was trying to use my phone and under pressure from something else, more exciting updates coming soon.

All the best,
Lee