CONTINUOUSWAVE

For several months the forum at CONTINOUSWAVE.COM has been under enormous user pressure due to unscrupulous bots requesting thousands of forum pages every hour and causing gigabytes of web traffic. As of April 2020, the bot storm has seems to have abated. The response of the forum to normal use has returned.

Is this site being specifically targeted? Is the purpose of the storm to shut you down? Do you have any idea of the source?

My G-Bodyforum gets hit too. It usually shuts it down for days and the administrator has to jump through hoops to get rid of it. My question is- WHY? Are computer skilled people THAT bored? Or just evil?

The promiscuous bots are trying to index websites and perhaps harvest email information. I don't know their motives. As a result of the search engine of GOOGLE, I suppose people think they are entitled to search the web with bots and map out information or mine information.

The bot attacks are a common problem with sites running PhpBB, like CONTINUOUSWAVE. The forum content is actually generated dynamically from a database. Every time someone asks to see a thread or an article in the forum, the webserver has to generate all the HTML from content stored in a database. The bottle neck is the database access is limited. When you have some damn bot asking for 25 threads every second, it causes the database to exceed the limit of users connected to it.

The static HTML parts of the website, which is everything else but the new forum, are easy to serve up to visitors because they are static pages. There has never been any bottle neck on the static content pages. The problem is just from bots trying to mine data from the forum with 30-connections every second. They are often from China and Russia, so not really Boston Whaler boat owners.

I received an unsolicited, graphic e mail from an odd named person. It went to an e mail address I rarely use but was the one I was using when I first registered for this website. I wonder if it came from these bot scoundrels?

Any email address is likely to receive unwanted email from suspicious senders. I have been using the same email address since 1997, and every day I get 50 or more unwelcome emails. Sometimes I get five copies of the same email in a span of a few minutes. The people that send out mass email buy email addresses in bulk, by the millions. There is no way to know how the creeps that sell email addresses originally got them. Since there is no marginal cost to send out a few more emails, the mass emailer creeps keep sending them.