Difficulty Logging On

[dailey]

I've had a lot of difficulty logging on to this website lately like it's too busy. This weekend has been the worst. What's the issue and do you plan to fix it?

It took me over 20 attempts to make a connection to post this.

"Temporarily Unavailable
Due to high stress on the server the forum is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

[Chris-socal]

Yes, there have been some connection issues and problems overloading the server.
NLG is a completely volunteer group so resolving the problems takes time.
Just know it is known and being worked on.

Chris

[sixcardmark]

Here is the problem- 92 BOTS: Google (AdSense) (92) 

[shortrackskater]

Scotty, myself and Kevin are all aware of the issue... working on it. All three of us had some personal things to tend to on Saturday or Sunday. I'm on the site nearly all the time but Sunday is my big work day. 

[scotty]

Doing my best to fix it it is a bot problem I’m doing all I can to fix it hopefully it’ll be fixed soon I do apologize to any members that are having problems I get it’s frustrating but hopefully we’ll be back to 100% by the end of the week at the latest.

[knagl]

I've had a lot of difficulty logging on to this website lately like it's too busy. This weekend has been the worst. What's the issue and do you plan to fix it?

An update. A good friend of the site who is a wizard with stuff like this worked on it today and things seem to be a lot better now. As Scotty and Mark said, it's an issue of external bad bots (even if they're not trying to be bad) that have been overloading the server's resources, making it difficult for actual users to connect and use the site. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully things should be smoother going forward.

[Chris-socal]

The site hs been great all day today. Thanks for your work on it guys.

[Stayouttadabunker]

Just wondering....what are "bots"?

[Chris-socal]

I think its these. They originally caused problems for the Bionic Woman in the 70s, then new models came out and Austin Powers had to deal with them.
That my best guess.

[jay]

Bots (robots) are programs that are set loose to scan the internet and return information to their owners.
One potential use would be a program that would systematically go through ever single NLG page to scrape email addresses to be used for spam and phishing emails.
Theoretically all of these would be valid (verified) email addresses which are worth about 1/12th of a penny on the dark web. Collect enough of them and you can start getting some good passive revenue flowing in.  As they say in the news paper business. Its great when you can sell the same story over and over again. (aka selling a newspaper to a subscriber list).
On a positive note our members list which includes members emails is not accessible unless your logged on. This is one reason we validate all new members vs allowing auto-creation of accounts.
Once released these bots just continue to go from web site to web site pretty much autonomously. 

Other Bots try logging into the core engine - a typical web logon uses port 80 or 443 (Https) but when your talking about the guts of a web engine sometimes these logons are changed to ports like 444 etc just to prevent casual encounters. The bots would try looking for entry points of all 4096 ports. Once they find an open port they may self launch another knock at the door and try a brute force attack on the open port by trying to logon with "admin", "administrator", etc and use a list of passwords from a previous compromised list. IE the emails and passwords from 700k ticket master users were exposed. They would try all of those passwords against each of common logon names. This is a good reason to use a different password for every different site you sign up for. Once they have one password they hit up the common sites like Ticketmaster, Amazon, Chapters, Indigo, Yahoo, etc etc. Using your email address as a logon and the password which you use everywhere. Once they get a successful login someplace this information is transmitted back to the mother ship.

These are just a couple of examples and new bots and new attacks are launched hourly. From just these two examples you can easily see how much traffic just one bot from one bad actor hitting up NLG would cause. Think about tens of thousands bored highschool nerds are out there writing new bots. I believe I heard that NLG was being scraped by 30+ bots at a time and the guys were playing wack a mole trying to shut them down.

In the world of Cyber we have what is called a WAF - Web Application Firewall. Some web hosters provide this as a service, others charge for these capabilities and then there are commercial ($$$) addin's like CloudFlare that can be subscribed to control these.

[Stayouttadabunker]

I learn something new everyday...
I didn't know the Bionic Woman had those problems...   

Awesome answer Jay...heckuva world we live in these days 

[shortrackskater]

Thanks Jay. I could never have explained that all too well!
And Chris... I wouldn't mind "dealing with" those bots in that second photo.