Board down a lot lately for short time

[mdigi]

I also observe the same behavior periodically.

My suspicion (having no knowledge of the actual tech forum network architecture) is that some form of anti-DDOS/rate-limiting technology is being employed to prevent overloading the forum server.

Be cognisant of how frequently you make requests to the server. If you make several quick requests of the server (e.g. opening multiple posts of interest in new browser tabs within a matter of seconds) you may find the first few load properly, but later ones fail with the message in question. Waiting a short time and retrying will likely resolve the issue for legitimate users -- but if there is a sizeable aggregate spike in server requests across the network (possible bots/ddos) I suspect you may still see that message intermittently until things settle down.

[BrianEdwards]

I'll just add that this has been my frequent experience lately as well (today again). I've occasionally lost a post that I was iterating on with the Preview functionality, and suddenly the Board disappeared and my carefully-crafted message was lost... (some may not think my posts are carefully-crafted, but you should see my original versions!) The horrors

Also, for me it doesn't seem connected to the other usual suspects, LCR and LCRF seem to work okay most times the Board is unavailable.

[rmrichesjr]

One workaround for outages while composing a post would be to copy the content into a scratch Notepad or similar window. (An old joke comes to mind about someone who saves vs. someone who doesn't.

I doubt there's much in the way of strict rate limiting per IP address or per user. I routinely open 9 windows in the forum within less than a second of each other (almost as fast as opening all bookmarks in a bookmark folder at the same time), and I rarely see the 'down' notice when doing that.

[garystroble]

Well today, 8 November 2023 the board is having lots of problems. Either hardware is failing or something in the software has a bug in it or worse.

[Mikerowaved]

Well today, 8 November 2023 the board is having lots of problems. Either hardware is failing or something in the software has a bug in it or worse.

Yep. I tried several times to access the forum yesterday, but to no avail. It almost looked like the handshake with the SSO server wasn't happening correctly, but I may be off base.

[garystroble]

The problem continues.