PlanetZ forums @ scopeusers.com

AAAA records are not as easy while things are down, I'll see if I can get the server configured to pass that properly. Right now it will fail if you add that.

No need to waste your time with that. I thought, there's already an IPv6 address in place. So, I'm fine with IPv4 in the meantime.

Domain lock expired, not sure if that was godaddy support or upstream, but I just processed the renewal manually and it went through this time. We should be back in business. I will need to reconfigure Cloudflare and get that going again, and we will see how the bot traffic is...

yay!

Cloudflare doesn't like its configuration anymore, have rebuilt everything and it's still wonky. Not even at the point where the SSL cert will be an issue yet, so I'm going to have to hand edit all the settings. dig +trace NS scopeusers.com is returning expected results, working on this further right now. Expect downtime the next day or so.

Completely rebuilt cloudflare from scratch, and since the advanced cache reserve ate $60 for a month I have disabled that now, but left proxy requests for DNS and simple caching active. Somehow, I am -$125 on the billing again even with the downtime, but everything should be back to normal now.

For those who are just returning, apologies for the downtime. Will report any change in bot usages next month when we have enough data in.

Thanks a lot Valis.
Without this forum the scope world is very different... much less connected
glad that it is back to normal.

Thank you Valis,
It was like having a close friend disappear for a while - something was missing.
Glad to have it back!
maus

Hooray !
Thank you Valis, I was afraid of never having this forum again.
Long live planetz !

Yay !

I’m glad you guys are still happy to be here, makes it worth the time it takes.

Wow,- it´s back,- thank you Valis !
I tried to come here every day since about 2 weeks and it was only frustration.
Scope without Scopeusers.com and PlanetZ is no-go.

Now I´m happy again !



Bud

Just a note, less than 24 hours of cloudflare data: 855.39k queries (unique connections via a DNS call), 9.9 connections PER second, 25.49 GB bandwidth. So the 2 weeks of downtime had no impact, extrapolate out to ~30 days and it's about the same as it has been. Oh well.

I don't want to monetize this site, and a lot of the caching that saves data costs is outside the $20 paid tier (and I think maybe cloudflare was serving ALL calls from cache while the site was down, until I removed it, even though the connections didn't complete for actual users). Those costs are:

$0.36 per 1,000,000 read operations
$4.50 per 1,000,000 write operations
$0.015 per 1 GB-month

At 800GB-1.2TB/month, and about $2.day for read & writes, you can see that's about $15/month on top of the $20...

Something else never discussed, Cloudflare benefits from everyone using their edge peering because they are another layer of necessary service that is also a form of data collection that can be leveraged in ways that I haven't yet seen much discussion of. The guys I know that work there defend their service, but I recall when FB/Meta and other providers did too and we all know about the 3rd party data collectors now. It's not something to be overly paranoid about, but having to use this is similar to having to use a mail clearing service to even get top tier (hotmail, gmail, etc) mail delivery for a small server like this...that's another service that runs a monthly fee although it benefits my other domains too.

Just some thoughts about the lay of the land for low-usage (phpbb itself only shows a few of us actually here per hour throughout the day) web hosting in the era we are in. All of this benefits large platforms like FB/X/etc because it's easier to setup something on there and just hand everything over to a platform provider rather than deal with this stuff. This isn't a complaint, just a reflection on what is.

many thx, and welcome back valis!

Perhaps the idea is taking shape to start a new domain and cancel this old one, since forum.scopeuser.com is now on too many phishing lists?
>>Of course, with all this scopeuser content (+userdata) of this awesome forum here

Since there is no need to account to advertising partners,
it seems to be the only solution to go underground again, thus saving time, nerves. and money, i think...

cheers
ron

The forum was originally on planetz.com, and I moved it to planetzforums.com for a while when I first got it. Cloudflare is proxying all of the DNS entries (that matter) for the forums, so that's more or less the same thing. What that means is whoever is scripting this, or whatever they're using to crawl the site, is tuned to bypass cloudflare's filtering and that's cloudflare's business model. I would guess that a domain name change would just get updated if someone is willing to go to all of that trouble.

The real question is, WHY?

There is no real “why”… creating chaos is simply fun for some people — or even governments. On SpaceF, it looked like kids trying tricks they saw on the internet about breaking into WordPress, just for the sake of causing annoyance and wasting time. no talent involved.
Fake orders have been numerous lately (not on the same scale as on this forum, though). While PZ was down, I reactivated the SpaceF forum, and to get rid of spammers, the only solution was to make access payable (€3). Since then, no bot or spammer has completed the process (bots and spammers will never pay), and the annoyance seems to have stopped. I still have some attempts to break in, but they are much less frequent than before and much easier to detect and delete. I am not sure this would work/be advisable for PZ.

Thanks Valis! Glad to have this back, I was getting worried for while.

Thanks for all your time and effort Valis, glad to see the site back.

Mehdi's idea sounds good

I guess, a "payment protection" only works against some kind of attacs. (like crawlers downloading the whole site over and over)
But for "classic" denial of service attacs the initial dataexchange of an evil client connecting to the server still takes place, so a paywall doesn't help.
You'd need some sort of "gatekeeper", which brings back the big players back on the list.