105 replies to this topic

[PoolGuy]

I used to search on the forum by typing mini forum into google followed by what I wanted to search. It would bring up a list of all the relevant topics on the mini forum.

It doesn’t seem to working for me like that lately.

Yes, I’d noticed that. I guess it’s a downside of them trying to lock things down. It doesn’t make it an easy forum to use though.

[sonikk4]

What folks have to understand is there is only a few of us who actively look after the forum and of course the platform it uses is i believe quite old and does need updating.

 

The owner is actively looking into what needs to be done in the very near future, but like all of us we do have lives outside of the forum and Mark falls very much into that catagory. He is a very busy person.

 

I have probably said this many times but bear with us, improvements will be made. The rise of AI and what it means for hackers with regards to be given additional tools to disrupt not just us but any other forum out there just adds another level of hate and boy have we been suffering from that hate.

[fikasteve]

No no please don’t take it as a dig, just an observation. I’m rather a technophobe and certainly couldn’t run anything like an online forum.

I don’t understand why hackers would want to disrupt this forum though. Surely they have better people to target, as a group we have no money, we spend it all on mini bits.

[sonikk4]

No no please don’t take it as a dig, just an observation. I’m rather a technophobe and certainly couldn’t run anything like an online forum.

I don’t understand why hackers would want to disrupt this forum though. Surely they have better people to target, as a group we have no money, we spend it all on mini bits.

 

I would spend literally hours binning spammers off every week until it got too much and i literally stopped one evening, enough was enough. Adam waved some of his IT magic but also saw in the background (he has deeper access than me) what was actually happening. It helped but the buggers are tenacious and whatever algorithim they use is bloody relentless.

 

Hopefully if Mark and Adam get time together then something will change. Not taking it as a dig by the way, too old and too thick skinned to worry. It just shows though that anything is fair game to individuals or entities who get their kicks from upsetting other folks hobbies or ways of life.

[Deathrow]

I've just queried how many TMF members with more than zero posts have been online in the last 12 months, it's less than 1,800. Conversely, the forum reports that the most visitors we've ever had on the site at once was 27,678 on 1st June 2025. Now that doesn't account for legitimate visitors that might not be logged in but the very nature of the forum means that most of our visitors are regulars and they're members. We had 61 users login on the 10th; that's including a number of spam registrations that we're filtered out. It doesn't take a lot of resources to run a website that might have 100 concurrent users and that's if they were all online all day. But it's a lot more resources if we have to worry about the fact that we could have to serve 25 times that number at any given time.

 

At the moment the forum is over-provisioned for the users it serves, that's so there is some headroom for if we get an inrush of non-genuine traffic.

 

I have noticed the search issue as that is also how I tend to search the forum (the IP.Board search is basically awful). It is unfortunately related to some of the measures I took earlier to try and abate the downtime we were experiencing because of the extra traffic. However, since any improvement we saw then appears to have just been a placebo I've just reverted those changes and as soon as the Cloudflare cache clears and shows the updates I'll request that Goole recrawl TMF and it should re-index the 30k+ pages it currently can't index because it's being directed not to crawl them.

[fokko]

Thanks for all of the efforts on this. I'm an IT professional and I know what a headache these kind of problems cause... Wondering though if Cloudflare can filter out the bots ?

[PoolGuy]

 

I have noticed the search issue as that is also how I tend to search the forum (the IP.Board search is basically awful). It is unfortunately related to some of the measures I took earlier to try and abate the downtime we were experiencing because of the extra traffic. However, since any improvement we saw then appears to have just been a placebo I've just reverted those changes and as soon as the Cloudflare cache clears and shows the updates I'll request that Goole recrawl TMF and it should re-index the 30k+ pages it currently can't index because it's being directed not to crawl them.

Thank you, really appreciate this.

[CallumAustin11]

I've just queried how many TMF members with more than zero posts have been online in the last 12 months, it's less than 1,800. Conversely, the forum reports that the most visitors we've ever had on the site at once was 27,678 on 1st June 2025. Now that doesn't account for legitimate visitors that might not be logged in but the very nature of the forum means that most of our visitors are regulars and they're members. We had 61 users login on the 10th; that's including a number of spam registrations that we're filtered out. It doesn't take a lot of resources to run a website that might have 100 concurrent users and that's if they were all online all day. But it's a lot more resources if we have to worry about the fact that we could have to serve 25 times that number at any given time.

 

At the moment the forum is over-provisioned for the users it serves, that's so there is some headroom for if we get an inrush of non-genuine traffic.

 

I have noticed the search issue as that is also how I tend to search the forum (the IP.Board search is basically awful). It is unfortunately related to some of the measures I took earlier to try and abate the downtime we were experiencing because of the extra traffic. However, since any improvement we saw then appears to have just been a placebo I've just reverted those changes and as soon as the Cloudflare cache clears and shows the updates I'll request that Goole recrawl TMF and it should re-index the 30k+ pages it currently can't index because it's being directed not to crawl them.

 

Thanks! Appreciate the effort. I can imagine this is a big headache!

[fokko]

Has it ever been considered to use the hosted offering from Invision? I have no idea how the cost of that would compare to our current budget, but I can imagine it would take a lot less work to keep the forum up in the air: https://invisioncommunity.com/buy/.

[PoolGuy]

 

 

I have noticed the search issue as that is also how I tend to search the forum (the IP.Board search is basically awful). 

Thank you, really appreciate this.

 

Thanks for sorting the Google search. It’s very much appreciated.

[sonikk4]

Just as a heads up, the Bots are having another dabble so hopefully they will not impact us like they have been, BUT they are sneaky swine so watch this space.

[Quinlan minor]

Yes, quite a few dropouts in the last couple of days.

[Quinlan minor]

Been a lot of drop outs over the last couple of days, again.

[stuart bowes]

this time though I've found the 'refresh' button does get me in after 1 or 2 clicks

 

more so than in the past where that sometimes worked but mostly not

[Quinlan minor]

Getting worse.

Showing "Host Error code 521"

Showing no new posts for twenty hours.

Suggests there's a major problem.

It took 3 goes to post this. 

Edited by Quinlan minor, Yesterday, 07:40 AM.