Recent difficulties

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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby rdearman » Mon Mar 07, 2022 10:27 pm

TSS42 wrote:I still don't understand why we need the charity status at all. Why can't the mods simply collect donations and pay whatever tax is due out of that donation?

The original purpose of the charity status was not just to run the forum but to fund some other things. It was also so that we didn't have the same problems we had at htlal where a single person controls the information. The idea was a charity has trustees which can change and the organisation can continue even if a couple of people leave. Also a charity can employ people to do things like support, upgrade and maintenance so you are not reliant upon volunteers all the time. You can also pay people to do coding, or customisations or even create content like courses, etc.

So yes, we will change it so we just collect enough money to run the site and avoid putting a tax burden on the mods, but a charity would have been better.
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby luke » Thu Mar 10, 2022 10:08 pm

Iversen wrote:I'm definitely willing to support the forum financially, and I'm grateful towards the people who have kept it running at their own expense so far. But the question is whether it will help if the capacity is increased. It was sufficient before the attack started, and now I fear that the intensity of the denial calls just will be increased and gobble up any increase in the capacity. If even blocking uncivilized bots and new applications doesn't help, what kind of denial calls is then responsible for the 502 and 503 calls and long delays? Are they coming from one single IP number or from a wide array of sources?

I'm grateful for our hard working Admins too.

Starting from the basis that LLORG is getting hit by a DDoS attack. (That first "D" is "Distributed" (Denial of Service)), I, too, am skeptical that bigger hardware will help much. For the less technical folks, DDoS attacks are a bit like Judo. A small opponent can defeat a bigger opponent by using the big person's weight and momentum in a way that being heavier is not such an advantage.

On the tax stuff, and I'm not an international tax attorney, nor do I know much more than the anecdote I'm about to share...

In my old days playing music, a smart musician was able to use their expenses for musical instruments, etc, in their taxes in such a way that being a starving musician at least had the costs of instruments and other stuff related to being a paid musician could actually reduce taxes. At that time, I think the musician had to show they "made money" for a year or two. That's easy, just declare your income and don't declare all of your expenses. Eventually, you can start reporting all your expenses and your "income" for being a musician gets offset.
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby Le Baron » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:57 am

One of us needs to meet Comrade rdearman in a park and hand over a brown envelope of contributions. No questions asked. Wear a red carnation in your left lapel.
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby rdearman » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:05 pm

Le Baron wrote:One of us needs to meet Comrade rdearman in a park and hand over a brown envelope of contributions. No questions asked. Wear a red carnation in your left lapel.


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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby sfuqua » Sat Mar 12, 2022 3:52 pm

I have no problem with paying a bit to upgrade the server, even if it doesn't stop the ddos. It may help a bit.
I want to support the fine people who run this site any way I can, and it's about time I put some money into supporting a site which has become very important to me...
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby iguanamon » Sat Mar 12, 2022 5:15 pm

Some questions: 1) Why would our non-commercial, non-political, non-controversial site be a target of a ddos attack? It just doesn't make sense to me.

2) Are ddos attacks just a normal part of having a website these days, regardless of the site?

3) Could it be someone with a grudge against the forum- an advertiser who was spurned or a member who was banned, or left on their own accord?

4) I noticed that after the site was down for a few hours last week, when it came back there were no 502/503 errors for a while. Could we voluntarily shut down the site for a week to ten days and would that have an effect?
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby Iversen » Sat Mar 12, 2022 5:25 pm

My guess is that it is one person with a grudge who has assigned a computer to one task, namely to attack this forum.
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Mar 12, 2022 5:42 pm

iguanamon wrote:Some questions: 1) Why would our non-commercial, non-political, non-controversial site be a target of a ddos attack? It just doesn't make sense to me.

2) Could it be someone with a grudge against the forum- an advertiser who was spurned or a member who was banned, or left on their own accord?

3) I noticed that after the site was down for a few hours last week, when it came back there were no 502/503 errors for a while. Could we voluntarily shut down the site for a week to ten days and would that have an effect?


It likely is not a DDOS but rather forumbots in volume. These try to sign on and post spam. And likely what is happening is that this loads up the cookie directory on the server and regular requests then time out. It’s a reported issue with this version of the software. Turning off the site won’t solve it.

Probably upgrading will help and it may be necessary to install CloudFlare CDN or the AWS equivalent to balance traffic. Or simply, as EMK wrote, the instance needs to be larger. Setting up CloudFlare or upgrading the forum software or the AWS instance isn’t rocket science but it is dedicated work and time. And right now only one person has the access to do this. And since this is all voluntary work, and a lot of it, it takes time to get done.

One option is hiring a freelancer to complement the SysOps work but that too takes time and cost. My own business SysOps is costing 200 to 500 a month. If it helps the team I can support the process of finding additional support …
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Mar 12, 2022 5:50 pm

Iversen wrote:My guess is that it is one person with a grudge who has assigned a computer to one task, namely to attack this forum.

No. Unless you actual have proof this it is just a bad guess. A quick search on the forum software site explains many more reasons why this problem may occur.

This is not what DOS attacks look like.

Just search "503 error pphbb" on google and you'll see this is a frequent issue and not the work of one person on this forum.
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Re: Recent difficulties

Postby luke » Sat Mar 12, 2022 8:19 pm

rdearman wrote:which would allow me to connect to my email server, which means emails would finally start working again.

I'd be curious about a few things:

Does the site have a feature that sends emails when a thread is updated?
Are some accounts "subscribed" to hundreds or thousands of threads, meaning they would generate a lot of email if it were working?
Could that the email isn't working be the bottleneck? I.E., PHPbb tries to connect to the email server to deliver the aforementioned "subscriptions", and the connection eventually times out (perhaps to be re-tried later). During the "waiting for the email server" connection (timeout), there aren't enough threads to handle normal PHPbb operations?

I'm game to help figure out what's going on. Solving performance issues is something I've got some experience with. I'm very interested in getting this one solved. If the servers are Linux, that's my thing.

I understand my little theories may be annoying, but it's the sort of stuff I do in the real world and I like tracking stuff down and figuring out what's going on to "make the world a better place" (tm).
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