What is happening to the board?
 

Can't seem to access it reliably over the last few days!

George

Im pretty sure is Google wants its ransom fee. They label the website "unsafe" until you give them money. It happened to my business site even though it was an information site only.

its nothing to do with google... its a server or data base issue with the company that provides the website hosting, or other technical issue related to that.

I’m not having an issue , all good here, I posted yesterday, and it’s fine her today.

Now for me access has gone from hours to 2 days. I belong to Cub Cadet forum uses basically same format as here. I cant remember ever not access

I haven't been able to access the forum for the last two days. Finally came up on this attempt

When you use Google Chrome to get here it says "site unsecure" at the beginning of the address bar.

I use google chrome on a PC... dont see or get that message.
The error messages I was getting said data base error, or server timed out, then has a message to contact the site administrator to request longer time out times, or something to that effect. Nothing about site unsecure on my end.

All I know is the same thing happened to my site until I paid Google for a "security certificate". Then it was fine after that.

I dont doubt that happened for you... but dont think thats an issue here.

This current access problem was/is a data base or host server issue, same for the recent issues where we werent getting email notices for new replies to threads or took forever to post or edit comments. Maybe an admin can chime in on whats going on or how they address/fix these things when they happen?

I check the forum regularly. It’s been a great help for me. I reached out to Eric today. Left a voicemail, sent a message thru their contact link and even spoke with Wendy. The forum is working for now. Hopefully fixed. If/when Eric returns my call, I’ll relay the information. He might be bombarded with messages like mine.

I use Firefox,say unsecured

We are working on the issues. It's been a server/host related issue combined with an obnoxious amount of spamming attempts.

I use duck duck go, same deal with accessing site, says hosting error or simply times out. Obviously working now.

It'll work for about 10 minutes, and stop working for hours, if not a day or so.

It's about to kick a rod

First successful access in about 4 days...

Glad to hear it is being addressed!

Here's the main problem with this:

This seems to happen about every day.

Most web hosts have a certain amount of 'connections' unless you pay a lot more for them.

I'd say the 'bots' are basically a D.o.S. situation?

The 'unsafe' site thing is another type of thing, not really a problem except it makes people scared/leery. It's a certificate a website uses to have a 'secure' website url. (https)

It expires every so often and you have to update it. (some charge for that)

:confused:

Got on for the first time in several days, maybe a week. At the bottom of the Home page you can see how many people are on the site. I noticed the last time I got the site to load up there were like 20,000 people on the site. It also says that yesterday was the all time high of over 25,000 users. Today it's only around 1500.

This is what I have been noticing also. Way too many 'guests' browsing the site.

I haven’t had time to sign in for around three weeks; could even connect last night, but had zero issues today.

Right now (Friday 6/6/2025 6:45 p.m. Eastern) the stats show 46 members and 13,700 "guests". I can't believe there'd be that many guests at one time. I would be surprised if there were 1,000 people total on here at any one time. I don't always log in, but even if 9 out of 10 "real" users weren't logged in, that wouldn't equate to 1,000 users at once. Could it be tied to cookies or trackers or other elements that cause the site to see users as still here after they navigate away? Supposedly many people pay zero attention to clearing their cookies or history and don't use any kind of ad blocking or anti-tracking capabilities.

I couldn't get on all day till now at 8pm.

Been down for almost 24hrs, although it looks like it's working for all of 5 minutes again.

See you guys in another day or so!

Yes, that’s the way it seems!

I have only been able to get on about once every 22 hours.

There’s something going around virus wise on other sites also.

Another site I go to when I try to get on reply’s back with “ To many requests “ and then when I do get on the site runs slow just like this one.
Sometimes even once I am on that site I get that crazy reply again.

Looks like Speed Talk is having their problems too. Just not as bad as this.

Just on now today.

Hit or miss access lately

Sent from my moto g power 5G - 2023 using Tapatalk

Crashes
 

When a website “ crashes “ or can’t
be reached - usually it means the
server or host has more requests
than can be accommodated.

I have had the same host for my
website since 2006 - it crashes
maybe once a year because there
is enough user storage to accommodate
requests.

Jim

Use Godaddy, no crashes.

Do you have a Go Daddy site?


:confused:

I can't get on in am only in the evening say after 8pm.

Same here Mike; no access for four days or so. Edge, Chrome, Safari, windows desktop, iPad and Android all had error messages.

Needed my Pontiac fix so I'm happy to see we have access

Just got through and the response is very fast!

Wouldn't it be great if the web host found some software to reject the bots?

I'm optimistic based on this:

https://forums.maxperformanceinc.com...1&d=1749400181

The number of 'Guests' is climbing quickly and every few seconds if I refresh the page the number is a few higher. They should just disable Guest access altogether. Get a login or you don't get access doesn't seem unreasonable and some other sites are set up like that.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/...a-ddos-attack/
What is a DDoS attack?

distributed denial-of-service


:(

Working great today;)

Just checked ... guests are up to 9,900. Worked great all day with guests in the 3-6k range.

Ogre

We hope to have all bugs worked out and new spam/bot protection in place. Anybody been having issues with the site for the past 24 hours??

Seems better than it ever was so far Eric.
Nice work;)

Works every time and fast in the last 24./.

Good 2 Go !
 

Thanks Eric !! :car:

Been working great for me the last two days! Thanks for the upgrade or whatever you did.

Gratitude!

Working great now, thank you.

One has to wonder if some of these “guests” are AI LLM’s trawling for data. Heard it’s a huge issue for some sites and eats up a lot of bandwidth.

Hopefully the large amount of page views results in increased ad revenue for the site.

Been considering donating to PY to keep the site running. Seems more difficult than ever to keep something like this running.

Thanks for keeping the forum going

Bots and DDoS attacks have been going on since the internet began.
Didn't know they renamed it AI LLM, but they have to sell that BS to somebody.

I'm grateful for the effort taken to reduce the bot traffic, not only because the forum is back but I also think it reduces the risk for underlying criminal activity and ID-related targeting.

Perhaps something as simple as a CAPTCHA for log-in would add some value?

Or even 2-step authentication?

This site clearly uses cookies to remember my log-in, so I would not mind proving I'm human (careful...) to log in the first time. Seems if this happened, the chances of automated log-ins would be reduced.

Absolutely

To the Admin: Thank you for your efforts. The site has been running very well for me. At it's worst, I gave up completely for over a week.

Happy to see back up & running. Thank you. As this is the now the longest lasting of all the Pontiac Forums, with a TON of searchable "classic" tech, hate to see the slide this forum has been on for the last half dozen years.

ChatGPT and the like are characterized as Large Language Models. Basically they work by trawling the bulk of the internet for vast amounts of information, and store it to generate responses to queries.

Imagine if hundreds of people were clicking thru every page of every thread on the board, repeatedly. The server only has so much capacity before things stop working.