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Forum Outages — Parallax Forums

Forum Outages

The forums seem to be experiencing some major downtime lately!

Anyone have an idea what's going on?

Comments

  • TonyB_TonyB_ Posts: 2,215

    I fear some people might give up on Parallax if this carries on.

  • VonSzarvasVonSzarvas Posts: 3,594
    edited 2025-06-12 15:20

    Seems like some security settings in AWS that didn't agree with themselves after upgrading themselves.
    Jeff is working on it with some AWS engineers. I'd guess it's related to some legacy settings that no one knows about and no one seems to be able to find, but they no doubt will soon :)

    Could also be partially sketchy traffic related; For example, we had >18000 hits on the OBEX server last Thursday afternoon which wasn't ideal and I had to add some "stuff" to deal with that and keep it responsive. I suspect the learn and forum sites are seeing something similar. The traffic I can see on OBEX has been mental the last week, - someone or something (AI?) is downloading lots of stuff over and over. Though they are throttled to a calm Sunday afternoon pace now :D

  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,371

    I don't know if this is related, but it was just reposted by a former Parallax employee who is now working in a critical role at one of our country's security organizations.

  • RaymanRayman Posts: 15,355
    edited 2025-06-12 19:38

    Thought they might be upgrading the forum software... Guess not. Suppose that's good news.

    Was a good test to see if I'm addicted to P2 forum or not...

  • RaymanRayman Posts: 15,355

    Btw: was wondering about emergency alternatives …

    Not completely sure how Discord works, but is there a P2 discord group?

    Seem to recall something about that…

  • @Rayman said:
    Btw: was wondering about emergency alternatives …

    Not completely sure how Discord works, but is there a P2 discord group?

    Seem to recall something about that…

    Yes, it's here: https://discord.com/invite/9TkW8jD

    No one knows how Discord works, they keep changing it. Now they're trying to sell you THE ORB or whatever. But alas, they killed off casual IRC, so it's what'll need to do for now.

  • Ok, this is getting ridiculous now...

  • I agree

  • JonnyMacJonnyMac Posts: 9,371

    When I was in CA Jeff told me that Parallax servers are constantly barraged with foreign DOS attacks.

  • evanhevanh Posts: 16,576

    And now AI crawlers as well, I bet. Those things grab everything they can get.

  • A lot of sites are using this software now to block scraping bots: https://anubis.techaro.lol

    Downside is that javascript is required. It's apparently very difficult to properly block those guys otherwise, allegedly some of them proxy through some kind of botnet, so the requests come from random people's home IPs. And of course none of them read robots.txt or anything like that.

  • @evanh said:
    And now AI crawlers as well, I bet.

    on the bright side.... maybe the AI will get better at Spin code syntax :)

  • evanhevanh Posts: 16,576
    edited 2025-07-08 05:39

    Plural! There'll be hundreds if not thousands of them. And each one is employing tactics of deception, exploits, and DDOS to break into website databases. The sort of things "hackers" are sent to jail for doing even once.

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