A Gardeners Forum Forums Administration Site News Forum Downtime Transparency

I am sure that several of you have seen the forums having stability issues over the last week; we've been under attack from Chinese bots that have been wasting bandwidth and making things completely unstable.

I tried to roll out several band-aids over the last week such as banning IP ranges and adjusting the analytic logs to only store records for an hour (it was 24) to see if the attacks would stop filling our database with data which keeps crashing the site; this was all ultimately to no avail.

Today I took the leap to ban China and Singapore outright from accessing any server resources at the CDN level (think of our CDN/Content Delivery Network as a server that sits in front of our server, directing traffic) and it appears that the traffic has returned to normal (pre-attack) levels.

I'm not sure what China has against gardening sites; but I'm sure that this final step, in addition to increasing our security level on the CDN, will solve this issue once and for all.

Yay ! So glad to hear this...(That you have things under control.) Thank you so much.

Good grief.

Jeepers, what a mess for you to have to deal with.