Scraping Event - Brief Forum Outage - 2026-Sep-26
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A write up is here: https://github.com/triplea-game/forums/discussions/5
In short, a scraper started sending us 70x traffic and the forum fell over.
In response, made a number of changes that will help us going forward:
- most categories are now hidden to non-registered users. "News" and the "Bug Report" categories are the only ones publicly visible now. This gives less surface area for a scanner, so they hopefully move on more quickly.
- applied a lot of infrastructure tunings to reduce the CPU cost of serving a forums website request
- increased connection limits on the NGINX (the web server in front of forums)
- added a missing database index that caused guest page views to be very expensive for the CPU
- added site wide rate limits and per-IP rate limits. The site wide rate limits will more help the forums degrade gracefully rather than fully crash.
- moved assets to be served directly from web cache instead of by the NodeBB forumn software. Requests for assets are much easier on the server now and no longer involve any database writes.
- turned off the feature to count for the number of non-registered user page views. Simply counting the number of views requires an update to database. Every scraping request added to page counts, and so turning the feature off removes these database writes.
Overall, the updates make each web request a lot cheaper for the server to serve, which means higher capacity. The scraper event stopped at about the same time when we started responding to it. With these updates, we might mostly survive another scraping event (but if the request rate is high enough, we probably wouldn't).
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L LaFayette referenced this topic
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Is "scraping" essentially a massive "bot" attack ? although attack might not be the right description.
Just wondering if what triplea experienced was/is similar to what Djensen experiences at the other site periodically. It basically started after a nodeBB update, which was done here not all that long ago also.
Anyway, he put up some defenses as well, in case you are interested in what he did or he may be interested in what you did.
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/42468/bot-attacks?page=1
Edit
I just saw the other thread, so basically was a massive ai bot screwing everything up
We need our own bot Army to counterattack
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