LPG Discussion Forum

Some of you may have noticed issues with the forum between 6:30pm on Thursday (17th) and about 5:00pm on Friday (18th).

After some investigations it turned out that the forum was being agressively crawled by some random Search Bot which had nailed the server CPU at 100% load.
I've taken steps to block this service but these things are a bit like 'whack-a-mole', when one is blocked another poorly coded will start up knocking on the door.

As I had to restart the webserver anyway I also took the opportunity to apply some outstanding updates and reboot the server completely - some of you may have noticed that the site was inaccessible for a few minutes during this time but the upshot should be more stability etc.

On the subject of upgrades, there is an update to the forum software we are using and I am planning to perform the update over the weekend of 5th/6th March. I have a test instance of the Forum on another server where I will install and test the upgrade package and work out any issues etc but I don't see any major issues coming out of these investigations. I'm also looking at some additional plugins to help reduce the burden on the moderators when it comes to spam registrations & posts.

During the upgrade the forum will be inaccessible for a period of time but I will keep this to a minimum and will post more information a few days before I flick the switch.

I thought there might have been a problem but put it down to the storm yesterday. Although working it was incredibly slow, taking about 30 seconds to move from one page to the next. Good news on reducing the spam, it's getting silly when I refresh my connection and see over 10 spam posts that need deleting. Why do spammers think we all need to know about cheap Viagra and betting sites?

Had noticed the same with slow loading, though it was still usable at that point, good to know you were on the case with it though thanks Dave!

To be fair, its also a load of porn site advertising and badly written repeats of what appears to be a scam as well as the viagra spamming and betting ones, most of which seem to keep reappearing (not just here).