Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Is it just me, or have the "reaction" emojis (Oh yes, Hugs, You're talking shit etc) and the little red tab on posts to view/post them been removed?

No real issue if they have - just curious.

It was playing up, all of a sudden, so I merely deactivated it until I get a moment to investigate the whys and wherefores.

Sorry to report that the Host Errors are continuing - couldn't connect at 8am. This has been ongoing for the past week, but seems to be getting worse.

Also, posting sometimes takes minutes to respond. It's tempting to hit Submit again in desperation, which could be the source of the double posts we occasionally see.

It is. I've been seeing the Cloudflare stuff for some time and posts sometimes do take a long time to load. If you do hit 'submit' again, you usually get a message saying "At least one other post etc." and there will be your post so at this point, I just click and cancel the second post before it loads.

I have noticed of late on other forums that they've been besieged by spammers, for what reason I know not: one forum I follow used to get over 2,000 people online at once (a normal figure was under fifty) and as a result, their allocated data got eaten up in a few days and took them off-line until the new calendar month reset the data allocation, at which point it repeated. Other forums I use have now geo-restricted posters to the UK and e.g. Australia *only*.

Fact is, this software is old and really starting to show it. I have made some changes to the php configuration and, whilst I don't imagine that it will mitigate all the bugs, I am merely trying to manage them out of the overall experience.

Onwards and sidewards.

Is this a new feature?

Same.
I don't seem to be able to log on from my phone any more. Laptop is OK, but that's through a VPN.

1, the 521 errors are not specific from our CDN and generally (briefly) occur when the server is under heavy load, or when maintenance work requires a restart.

2. requests to http://mailwatched.co.uk will usually fail. Requests to https://www.mailwatched.co.uk usually not. As has oft been suggested, cache hygiene is a good thing.
2.b. VPNs are great for porn but bring nothing to our rather more civilised and less sticky party.

I get cloudflare occasionally, although hitting refresh usually clears it. I also have trouble using Quick Reply lately.

VPN lets me watch the grands prix when in France...

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Mon Aug 04, 2025 10:37 pm VPN lets me watch the grands prix when in France...

Yeah. That's what Kreuz was saying.

(You tee 'em up, I'll toe-poke them into the onion bag.)

Apologies for the outage this afternoon.

The DNS needed to be changed in order to resolve the intermittent Cloudflare error. It took a while to refresh.

Is that why I was getting security certificate errors even though I'd deliberately done the https stuff?

Probably because it was pointing to the domain registrar until everything refreshed. Our SSL is tickety-boo.

I found this quite amusing. Quite what Trainline has to do with it is anybody's guess.

I was having ishoos, getting the message below when I tried to post. Once again, Kreuzie has come riding to the rescue and everything is currently tickety-boo.

That feller's an absolute star.

If the site was a bit sluggish these last couple of days, it is because we have been under sustained attack from bots. Quite a few mitigations have been put in place this afternoon and evening which should weed out many of the miscreants. Almost 3m sessions have been given a good slap, too.

Importantly, many countries have been totally blocked, so if anyone is planning a holiday outside the EU, please let me know.

This is where I'm ahead of the game. Since they went into partnership (sic) with Virgin Media, O2's data signal has turned to dogshite. I hadn't noticed any difference from usual. Sluggish internet performance is the norm.

kreuzberger wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2026 10:07 pm If the site was a bit sluggish these last couple of days, it is because we have been under sustained attack from bots. Quite a few mitigations have been put in place this afternoon and evening which should weed out many of the miscreants. Almost 3m sessions have been given a good slap, too.

Importantly, many countries have been totally blocked, so if anyone is planning a holiday outside the EU, please let me know.

Geo-blocking probably won't work, Kreuzy - you'll likely find that these malicious bots will switch to using VPNs so you'll have to block those too. Mate of mine owns and runs a vintage radio/tv forum and that was his experience; he geo-blocked for a long time anyway but when things got out of hand he just restricted it to the UK - and then the bots started to use VPNs so he had to block those as well. In the end he just took the forum behind closed doors (and closed it to new registrations as well), whilst another forum uses a Cloudflare-type service. One vintage model train forum was so badly overwhelmed by them (the monthly data allocation was used in a few days) that the owner just called time and closed it down. That was a great pity as a valuable resource for coarse-scale 'O' gauge modellers and collectors has now been lost.

This, folks, is what the headlong rush towards AI and LLM means: forums especially are rich pickings for those building these up so sod you and your forum, I've got money to make. Already I'm using the search term "-ai" in my searches and in one case, I've even seen someone recommending "poisoning your data" to render this wholesale piracy of content useless.