Just letting folks know that the forum has now moved behind Cloudflare.
The forum had to be taken down this morning from some heavy bot crawling and combining this with some IP address blocking (which doesn't work for long), we're back up.
I added Cloudflare a while back but some folks ran into issues where they were getting logged out fairly quickly and posting topics had some issues. I think I've fixed some of those issues, but if you run into any issues with the forum, please email me matt AT trials.com.au.
Forum added to Cloudflare
Moderator: Moderators
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mattyl01
- Website Wrangler
- Posts: 89
- Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2012 11:12 pm
- Club: Matt Langtree
- Bike: GasGas
- Location: Melbourne
Re: Forum added to Cloudflare
I'm giving Cloudflare another go in an attempt to keep the forum more online than offline which it has been recently. I disabled it for a period of time because it is largely incompatible with the phpBB forum software we run here.
If you run into any issues with the site in the next few days, especially concerning logging in or staying logged in, please write me at matt AT trials DOT com DOT au.
If you run into any issues with the site in the next few days, especially concerning logging in or staying logged in, please write me at matt AT trials DOT com DOT au.
-
mattyl01
- Website Wrangler
- Posts: 89
- Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2012 11:12 pm
- Club: Matt Langtree
- Bike: GasGas
- Location: Melbourne
Re: Forum added to Cloudflare
If you've experienced issues accessing Trials Australia Forum over the last few weeks, these should now be resolved.
If it's not fixed for you or you're a regular user of the forum and you've experienced issues, firstly apologies for the inconvenience, and please send me at an email to let me know that you've been impacted: matt AT trials DOT com DOT au
If you like the nerdy details, here's what happened. Most folks can stop reading here.
Over the years we've had surges of bot traffic on the forum. Sometimes it's overeager AI bots slurping up the lovely knowledge you've all put into the forum to power answers in Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT AI chat. To some degree, I'm OK with this because it benefits me too. Sometimes it's more malicious actors looking for vulnerabilities to exploit so they poke at every known page they can. The attack in February 2026 has been the biggest yet and was a third kind, a Denial of Service attack. They would load a page, not sticking around to care about what was on it load and bail, never to be seen again. Just consume resources on our server and that would be done by up to 20-30 unique people (at unique IP addresses) every second. Incredibly overwhelming for the server.
300,000 trials enthusiast in one day. Not likely.
I had to upgrade to a much beefier server and the forum still remained down for hours at a time for weeks. To mitigate the attack more holistically, in mid-February I blocked entire countries (China, Russia, Pakistan and a few others), old Chrome browsers (<v100 released in 2022) and rate limited pages you could access (if you accessed too many you'd get blocked). This all worked and to me it looked like it didn't affect folks, but there was at least one of you, maybe a few who got blocked.
Today I loosened up the rules a bit further Chrome browsers 70+ are OK now (released in 2018) and allowed higher page accesses before you'd get blocked. If you ever notice the forum down for more than a few hours, please send me an email: matt AT trials DOT com DOT au
Cheers,
Matt
If it's not fixed for you or you're a regular user of the forum and you've experienced issues, firstly apologies for the inconvenience, and please send me at an email to let me know that you've been impacted: matt AT trials DOT com DOT au
If you like the nerdy details, here's what happened. Most folks can stop reading here.
Over the years we've had surges of bot traffic on the forum. Sometimes it's overeager AI bots slurping up the lovely knowledge you've all put into the forum to power answers in Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT AI chat. To some degree, I'm OK with this because it benefits me too. Sometimes it's more malicious actors looking for vulnerabilities to exploit so they poke at every known page they can. The attack in February 2026 has been the biggest yet and was a third kind, a Denial of Service attack. They would load a page, not sticking around to care about what was on it load and bail, never to be seen again. Just consume resources on our server and that would be done by up to 20-30 unique people (at unique IP addresses) every second. Incredibly overwhelming for the server.
- bot-attack-trials-Australia-forum.png (229.61 KiB) Viewed 298 times
300,000 trials enthusiast in one day. Not likely.
I had to upgrade to a much beefier server and the forum still remained down for hours at a time for weeks. To mitigate the attack more holistically, in mid-February I blocked entire countries (China, Russia, Pakistan and a few others), old Chrome browsers (<v100 released in 2022) and rate limited pages you could access (if you accessed too many you'd get blocked). This all worked and to me it looked like it didn't affect folks, but there was at least one of you, maybe a few who got blocked.
Today I loosened up the rules a bit further Chrome browsers 70+ are OK now (released in 2018) and allowed higher page accesses before you'd get blocked. If you ever notice the forum down for more than a few hours, please send me an email: matt AT trials DOT com DOT au
Cheers,
Matt