Modifications to eOmahaForums

[BRoss]

The previous login issue when using www.eomahaforums.com should be resolved now as I have it redirecting to eomahaforums.com (without the www).

[riceweb]

I can no longer log in from my work laptop

[BRoss]

I can no longer log in from my work laptop

Are you able to access the site at all?

[riceweb]

I could on my laptop, and currently logged on via my laptop. I'm assuming you're blocking the connections depending on how my VPN bounces around to different servers.

[Busguy2010]

I simply didn’t log in for a few days, as logging in from the main page was giving me an error message. But oddly enough, if I press post reply, the login page that takes me to works as normal. I still can't log in from the main page.

[BRoss]

I simply didn’t log in for a few days, as logging in from the main page was giving me an error message. But oddly enough, if I press post reply, the login page that takes me to works as normal. I still can't log in from the main page.

Was that before the www fix on the 11th? Are you still having issues logging in?

I could on my laptop, and currently logged on via my laptop. I'm assuming you're blocking the connections depending on how my VPN bounces around to different servers.

We have certain countries blocked and a couple range of IPs blocked too that were being problematic. I may be able to remove the range since it may be covered in the country blocks.

[Busguy2010]

Was that before the www fix on the 11th? Are you still having issues logging in?

It was since you posted about an upgrade on the 9th. Ive not been able to log in by pressing the log in button from the main page. I found out I can only log in by pressing post reply, quote, and new topic. Not a big deal since I figured out a way, but the issue of not being able to log in via the log in button from the main page persists to the moment.

[BRoss]

Was that before the www fix on the 11th? Are you still having issues logging in?

It was since you posted about an upgrade on the 9th. Ive not been able to log in by pressing the log in button from the main page. I found out I can only log in by pressing post reply, quote, and new topic. Not a big deal since I figured out a way, but the issue of not being able to log in via the log in button from the main page persists to the moment.

There had been an issue with logging in when coming in through www.eomahaforums.com, but I've now redirected that to eomahaforums.com to fix the issue. What is the error you receive?

Interestingly, you come in from an IPv6 address, which I haven't seen from anyone here before.

[Busguy2010]

Was that before the www fix on the 11th? Are you still having issues logging in?

It was since you posted about an upgrade on the 9th. Ive not been able to log in by pressing the log in button from the main page. I found out I can only log in by pressing post reply, quote, and new topic. Not a big deal since I figured out a way, but the issue of not being able to log in via the log in button from the main page persists to the moment.

There had been an issue with logging in when coming in through www.eomahaforums.com, but I've now redirected that to eomahaforums.com to fix the issue. What is the error you receive?

Interestingly, you come in from an IPv6 address, which I haven't seen from anyone here before.

Interestingly, when I go actually type in eomahaforums.com, I get a server error. However when I Google search eomaha forums and click the search link, it takes me to the website main page, where from which when I press log in, type in my username and password and submit, it says something like invalid form. Its no big deal to me since I found a workaround, but maybe something you want to look into.

[Busguy2010]

And oddly enough, it worked this time. It worked maybe 2 times out of 10. Maybe its fixed, I'll try it again tomorrow.

[BRoss]

And oddly enough, it worked this time. It worked maybe 2 times out of 10. Maybe its fixed, I'll try it again tomorrow.

I'm pretty sure I know what the invalid form issue was and I changed something earlier that should fix that. Do you still get server errors when going to eomahaforums.com?

[Busguy2010]

Typing in eomahaforums.com works now, but logging in from the main page is back to not working.

[BRoss]

Typing in eomahaforums.com works now, but logging in from the main page is back to not working.

Ok, next time you run into this, can you do the follow and send it to me through a PM?

• Take a screenshot with the error and the web address
• Go to https://whatsmyip.com and get what your IP address is

I have some things I can look through and will probably open a support issue with phpBB to see if they can help track this issue down. The latest upgrade addressed some security vulnerabilities, but there could be a bug that they need to fix.

[BRoss]

There's been at least a couple people who are experiencing login issues and I am looking into that. If you are having issues, please either use the "Contact us" page if you can or else you can email me directly at my user name at the forum's domain. You can also try clearing your cookies or using a different browser to see if there is any difference.

While I have redirected www now and have had http redirected to https for years, please try to use https://eomahaforums.com when accessing the site as the latest phpBB upgrade to address a security vulnerability started enforcing using the configured host name and port.

I also put the site behind Cloudflare to help with bots in this past week (which I'm still fine-tuning as the issues haven't fully stopped) so if you are getting blocked, I'm curious if is the "The submitted form was invalid. Try submitting again." error that comes from phpBB, or something from Cloudflare, or if you get a page that says 403. Each of those have a different cause and will help me determine what the issue is coming from.

I have changed this topic to be global for now for more visibility.

[BRoss]

As I've been investigating periodic traffic spikes that consume database connections and cause CPU throttling, I have noticed a lot of traffic from non-US IP addresses. To combat that, a few things have been implemented recently:

• Certain foreign countries have been entirely blocked. I'm not going to list which ones because I don't want that circumvented and it could change over time as I continue to watch traffic patterns. But there is some insane traffic from places you wouldn't expect for a US city forum and there is one in particular that is over 10x that of US traffic.
• Other non-US IP addresses will receive a challenge. There are IPs that are either unknown countries or unmapped and I don't want to potentially block legitimate users. Those using VPNs, privacy relays, Starlink, and possibly on cellular carriers using NAT (many use IPv6 these days with eliminates this need) could fall in this range. If you happen to fall into this category, you will likely get a captcha page. Please let me know if you receive this because I'm curious whether it impacts any normal user and what you experience.
• Certain IP addresses used for servers in data centers will receive a challenge. There are US IP addresses that are problematic and this is to help with that.
• Bypassing Cloudflare has been blocked. Average users should not be concerned about this and what it means. But if you knew the origin server IP, then it was possible with things such as a certain cURL argument or putting it in your hosts file. And I definitely saw bot traffic directly hitting the origin server. The block is not the most perfect thing and there are certain other measures I'd love to take, but we are limited on a shared hosting solution and this is not something that is likely to be circumvented.

I'm hoping this will massively help us avoid the overloads that seemingly keep getting worse over the years to where you may periodically see over 1000 and sometimes even 2000+ guests online at a time.

The host migration has massively helped our performance to where we are no longer experiencing random slowness issues that were not necessarily due to traffic spikes but instead sometimes caused by processes getting stuck or poor server and database performance (which was not an indexing or other simple issue I could fix and nothing has changed with the move).

Please let me know if you experience any issues from this as I'm hoping it is not too aggressive of a setup and will adjust it as needed.

If for whatever reason you cannot log in or use the Contact Us page, then I have setup an email address for my user name@our domain (see your address bar if you are unsure) that I can be reached through. For spam reasons I'm not listing it clearly and being vague.

[remline]

But there is some insane traffic from places you wouldn't expect for a US city forum and there is one [country] in particular that is over 10x that of US traffic.

That 10X stat is wild! Thank you for your heroic efforts to keep us safe from the bots.

[BRoss]

But there is some insane traffic from places you wouldn't expect for a US city forum and there is one [country] in particular that is over 10x that of US traffic.

That 10X stat is wild! Thank you for your heroic efforts to keep us safe from the bots.

Thanks! Yeah, it's crazy how much bot traffic there is out there these days and seeing these stats has really helped me understand where it is coming from to help combat it. I may post a screenshot of it when I get a chance.

Before I would see certain ranges of IPs and look them up to see where they were from but that didn't give me the good picture I have now.

It's honestly been really tiring and annoying fighting this issue, but I think it may be under control with the latest changes outlined above.