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These errors seem to be getting more frequent and I notice the site slow down in general.

I think it's definitely worth giving something like CloudFlare a shot.

I second the slowdown experience and 503 errors.

I’m a little hesitant to go to Cloudflare because they are not necessarily one of the good guys on the internet, and make access from some places in the world very hard (recaptcha x10 per page, for example). However I don’t have a lot of tools to fight the abusive spiders that are occasionally hammering us - I’ve added rules to give them 403 errors but I don’t have easy access to check what’s going on much of the time. Right now on my phone I can’t easily see the activity or edit the bot patterns.

Well there are only really two options as I see it, move to a stronger host or use a CDN like Cloudflare.

As far as ethics I've not heard anything bad, infact they go out of their way to protect free speech etc, they should (usually) only block traffic identified as part of an attack.

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

Well, we have been using Cloudflare for a few days now and so far all is well. In particular we added rules to block the specific crawlers that were harassing us (~1.2 million hits per day compared to ~200,000 for everything else), and it's achieving a high cache rate (for images and the like). It is doing that thing that Cloudflare does where it gives you captchas if it thinks your browser or IP is weird, so please let us know if that is causing trouble.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post, but I'm having trouble accessing the subdomain gdri.smspower.org. I get "Error 525" 99.5% of the time I try to access the site. Mashing F5 _sometimes_ works.

The main site (www subdomain) always works fine, though.

Not exactly sure when this problem started, but it's been like for at least a few years.

525 errors are related to SSL. GDRI is not SSL-enabled. Thus you need to go to http://gdri.smspower.org, not https://gdri.smspower.org .

Actually, i tried both with http and https. I don't think it matters, because the problem is the cloudflare proxy.

It's a cloudflare error page that pops up. I tried attaching a screenshot.

2020-06-21_21-27-47.png (73 KB)

You're right - I hadn't seen that error before, but I managed to get it on one page load. It seems Cloudflare is trying to use https to our server on http requests, but strangely only sometimes.

Author	Message
djbass Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Posts: 587 Location: Melbourne, Australia	503 backend errors and slowdowns Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 12:24 am
	These errors seem to be getting more frequent and I notice the site slow down in general. I think it's definitely worth giving something like CloudFlare a shot.

Niloct Joined: 25 Dec 2005 Posts: 582 Location: São Paulo - Brazil	Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 12:58 am
	I second the slowdown experience and 503 errors.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 13504 Location: London	Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:32 am
	I’m a little hesitant to go to Cloudflare because they are not necessarily one of the good guys on the internet, and make access from some places in the world very hard (recaptcha x10 per page, for example). However I don’t have a lot of tools to fight the abusive spiders that are occasionally hammering us - I’ve added rules to give them 403 errors but I don’t have easy access to check what’s going on much of the time. Right now on my phone I can’t easily see the activity or edit the bot patterns.

djbass Joined: 25 Jul 2007 Posts: 587 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 11:46 am
	Well there are only really two options as I see it, move to a stronger host or use a CDN like Cloudflare. As far as ethics I've not heard anything bad, infact they go out of their way to protect free speech etc, they should (usually) only block traffic identified as part of an attack. https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 13504 Location: London	Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2020 9:48 am
	Well, we have been using Cloudflare for a few days now and so far all is well. In particular we added rules to block the specific crawlers that were harassing us (~1.2 million hits per day compared to ~200,000 for everything else), and it's achieving a high cache rate (for images and the like). It is doing that thing that Cloudflare does where it gives you captchas if it thinks your browser or IP is weird, so please let us know if that is causing trouble.

ctr Joined: 21 Jun 2020 Posts: 2	Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 10:14 am
ctr Joined: 21 Jun 2020 Posts: 2	I'm not sure if this is the right place to post, but I'm having trouble accessing the subdomain gdri.smspower.org. I get "Error 525" 99.5% of the time I try to access the site. Mashing F5 _sometimes_ works. The main site (www subdomain) always works fine, though. Not exactly sure when this problem started, but it's been like for at least a few years.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 13504 Location: London	Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 2:40 pm
	525 errors are related to SSL. GDRI is not SSL-enabled. Thus you need to go to http://gdri.smspower.org, not https://gdri.smspower.org .

ctr Joined: 21 Jun 2020 Posts: 2	Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 7:25 pm
ctr Joined: 21 Jun 2020 Posts: 2	Actually, i tried both with http and https. I don't think it matters, because the problem is the cloudflare proxy. It's a cloudflare error page that pops up. I tried attaching a screenshot. 2020-06-21_21-27-47.png (73 KB)

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 13504 Location: London	Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 9:07 pm
	You're right - I hadn't seen that error before, but I managed to get it on one page load. It seems Cloudflare is trying to use https to our server on http requests, but strangely only sometimes.

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