Who would like to thank the Mod crew, Mariah, Ben and Andrew for getting this site through this latest crisis and preserving this little community so important to all of us?

Best crew ever!
Thank you all for saving this site I consider home.

For whatever they did, I do thank them, as I have done before. I don’t want Fluther to go away.

But how about a little more information about the nature of the crisis and what it’s taken to resolve it? I don’t see what’s going on, but I know that everything is slow and that I’ve been unable to post a question for days.

Yes, the healing crisis seems to have passed and it was not a terminal condition. A big Thank You to the F team here for all your efforts. Nothing worse than trying to slog through computer issues, gah. A “Thank You” as well to @Espiritus_Corvus for the acknowledgment and reminder to the rest of the pod.

Mods, we couldn’t stay afloat without you. :-)

Will someone please tell me what’s been fixed? As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. It’s still broken.

@Jeruba It’s not perfect but much better. I did, just get, the internal server error again for the time in a couple days now. From what I understand there are still going to be some changes and adjustments and it may go down again or be wonky for awhile, but, ultimately, it should bounce back better than ever. That’s the jist I got from that sharing a few days ago.

A HUGE THANK YOU.

THANK YOU!

It is functioning much better now but, evidently, more needs to be done. I just hope it doesn’t involve new expensive hardware.

You can post questions via computer by clicking “Ask a Question” here.
You can thank @Stinley and @ibstubro for originally posting this temporary solution.

Aww thanks for making this thread.

@Jeruba The problem has been difficult to troubleshoot. No code has been changed recently so it’s not as though a change has been made that broke things. It does seem that the crisis is related to the amount of traffic coming into the site; that is, more people are accessing the site than the server can handle. I know it doesn’t seem there are more people accessing the site, but there are bots belonging to search engines that “crawl” through websites periodically – that’s how they know about websites in order to have them appear in your search results – and we were being crawled by at least three at once – Google, Bing, and a Chinese search engine called Baidu. I blocked robots from accessing Fluther and this helped a lot. However, you’ll notice that things aren’t completely fixed yet, meaning there’s probably an additional source of traffic on the site besides the search engine bots, so someone could be running a DOS attack on us for some reason. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot you can do to make someone stop DOSing you. In that case kind of your only option is to make your servers “strong” enough to handle that amount of traffic, which is what we’ll be doing next. The next change we’re planning is to move Fluther over to a faster host.

As far as what is fixed: the site is moving at a reasonable pace now and I haven’t gotten an internal server error message while trying to access anything in days, whereas before I was getting them more than 50% of the time while trying to access questions and do normal browsing.

In the meantime, if there’s anything that’s still not working for you, try doing it from the i.fluther.com mobile site instead of the desktop site.

Thank you for the info, @Mariah. And thank you for posting in a language we non-techs can understand.

[Mod says] Thanks, that’s very sweet. I miss all of you. My Fluther is still very glitchy, I’m happy to hear things are getting better for most.

@Jeruba I tried to send you a message yesterday, in response to yours – didn’t work, apparently. If you check out the recent Meta threads, you’ll see that we don’t have the full picture either. Here’s a recap: From what we can tell, Fluther may have been under some sort of attack. We know that we’ve been getting requests from many search engines at once, way too much traffic for Fluther to handle. This caused the site to shut down almost completely. @Savoir_Faire had the good idea to block search engines from finding us, and @Mariah put that into action. Of course, this is not a long-term solution by any means, so it’s vital to reverse that step. Ben is trying to find a real solution. Things may get worse again in the near future, but if we can find a way to improve the lagoon in the long term, I’d say that’s worth it.

Hey shout out to John Powell too. I am still a newbie engineer and he helped me figure some stuff out.

^ Definitely. And to our very own Augustlan for calling Ben, after being alerted by Phi that we were having trouble reaching him on all the usual channels. It’s great to see Fluther still has the power to very quickly bring lots of people together when it needs their help.

Also, of course, thanks to all the patient jellies. I’m betting the lagginess is even more frustrating when you’re not sure what’s going on. Thank you for being so supportive through all this.

Yes, definitely a big THANK YOU to @johnpowell. I saw a bit of that exchange and thought how amazing it is that a guy who describes himself as “not a very nice guy” was so eager to help with his expertise… once again.

^ I never bought that.

Are you guys using Cloudflare? It is super simple to set up (just need access to change the DNS server attached to the domain) and they can help mitigate the problems. It is free for basic caching and DDOS mitigation.

@longgone Neither did I. Real bad guys don’t advertise.

Thanks to mod crew for fixing the ship while others were sailing…) Thanks once more for keeping us afloat !!!

Thank you crew for all you do in te background. You all help way more people than you realize.
We’ve become a community. A caring, supportive, and (dare I say it?) loving community!
Group hug!!!
(((U)))

.. and thanks for all the behind the scenes anti-spam efforts!

Thank you, thank you, thank you! A big THANK YOU to the entire team!!!

Many thanks to them for allowing me, once again, to waste hours of my life each week!

Well crap, I am unable to ask a Q. at this time. The “next” button goes nowhere, there is no way to “next” now. I guess I can’t find out why my flap quit flapping. lol

@Coloma, that’s been my problem for days now.

What else I have noticed, though, @Mariah and @longgone, is that the usual spate of spam that comes in after about 11 pm Pacific time has not been showing up lately. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of a correlation between that data point and the site problems. Two effects of the same cause, perhaps? And possibly one of them more testable and diagnosable than the other?

^ Yep, it’s related. Spammers are having trouble logging on. Thanks, and please continue to let us know about any additional glitches.

@Coloma and @Jeruba Have you tried using the mobile site to ask questions? Until everything is fixed you should still be able to access full functionality at i.fluther.com.

That is what I had to do when I asked my last question. The next button on the main site did nothing so I just used the mobile one and that worked.

Didn’t know where else to ask this. I cannot post a question. I see others are still able to ask a Q. I have tried every angle I can think of and when I go to post the initial question….nothing. Cleared cache, restarted Fluther…no go. Any ideas?

@Cruiser look at @Mariah‘s post above ^^^^^^ . Using the mobile app seems to answer a lot of issues.

Thanks @Tropical_Willie.

Here’s to the crew that allows the day-to-day operations to go so smoothly that we only notice when something is seriously awry!

Thanks, Y’all!

I’m late again. Thank you all for your hard work. Someone used to say it’s a mystery how a small site with low traffic like this site is able to survive for so long. I think it has something to do with all of you :)

There’s a Trojan horse in out midst. Do not be fooled. lol

Yeah Team Fluther.

a tip of the tophat to our stalwart mods.

Mahalo.

Thanks, Mod Crew!

Also please do check out the Facebook page and bookmark it so that if the site is down again ever then at least you can look there and read what’s going on. No login or participation required. Here is the full address:
https://www.facebook.com/Fluthercom-106240583140498

It’s working! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!

Now we can go back to nightly bouts of spammer bashing. I usually flag bushels of them every night.

@Jeruba your efforts are very much appreciated ♥️

Typing this on desktop for the first time.

And I’m back to the spam flagging business!

@Mimishu1995 your efforts also are very much appreciated ♥️

@Stinley thank you for that FB link – it is different than the one I’d found when searching for Fluther last week.

https://www.facebook.com/Fluther-6276464639/?fref=ts

it wasn’t as helpful, but did have photos of a lot of flutherfolk in the fluthersalon