Stratovarius Community

Today it's been like day and night compared to yesterday, pages loading fast most of the time.

robocop wrote: Tue Mar 24, 2026 7:26 pm Calm down, mlords. We just got the forum back. Maybe in 8 years the bots will give up. Does Cloudfare cost money? We pool together money to pay for it, then. I designate a dollar of my disability pay to go towards this. "A land of new hope" in other words, AI jump fucked soon.

I've understood there is a free plan too, but I don't know if that is enough.


I guess turning more forum sections hidden from those not registered could decrease the amount of scrapers. Like for example if "Other discussions in English" was hidden, that could keep some amount of them away. The section could still be shown to exist without logging in, just not accessed. Just one free option that could potentially help a little bit.

Anyways even during a past a few years when posting here needed that method Zenith made a guide for, I occasionally went to read old stuff and didn't have that much trouble with lag. If it's laggy just sometimes, I don't think it's a big issue. But if the lag hell of yesterday happened regularly, that would be very annoying.

Hahaha! I hope the forum folks—administrators, programmers, or some of them—will tell me something. Someone changed the forum code, adding something that fixed everything. It's working perfectly for me now. Did they listen to that insufferable Mr. Cool Edit? Maybe they ignored him and did something else because his voice sounds like Timo Tolkki's villain? Maybe... maybe... maybe...

The point is, this fixed the problem, at least here in Argentina. And I'm using Linux on a 2010 i7 875K. Kids.

Yeah, things are dramatically different from yesterday. Now I see only 125 guests on the forum index page, compared to over 1,000 from the past few days. Hopefully it stays that way.

A simpler method than using Cloudflare to prevent rectal devastation by bots is to simply blacklist or timeout the IPs of those who are making HTTP requests too frequently. Well, that only works if the bots are indeed making too many frequent requests (I mean like requesting every 5 seconds or less). If there are just too many bots at once, making requests every 30 seconds or so, and eating up all the bandwidth, then something like Cloudflare becomes more useful. Hard for me to say what's really happening unless I were able to see the forum's access log.