Pet Shop Boys Community

Currently, the site is not accessible from Estonian, Romanian, or Hungarian IPs but is OK from UK for example...

Glad to see the forum back online, I feared that something bad was happened

delimit wrote: Thu 25 Sep 2025, 7:27 pm Currently, the site is not accessible from Estonian, Romanian, or Hungarian IPs but is OK from UK for example...

I'm seeing the same thing from an Irish ip address. Currently using a vpn connected to the UK to get on.

It was working fine for the first couple of days after the move but then stopped.

Can this be investigated asap please?

The site was offline here too for a couple of days again (the Netherlands), glad to see I can visit it again (since this morning)

Looks like the actions are the same as we had on the old provider (except getting now more and better infos about this all).

Somebody is DDoS attacing the forums and this always will result in offline times - now for those users only, who live in countries, the attacs came from.

Ugh, I sometimes have those for my hosting for the Jean-Michel Jarre forum. It usually results in banning half of Signapore or China because of eager Tencent bots scraping the site.

If you run the site through free Cloudflare CDN it can ask users to verify they're human, I think?

Annoying, but I'm sure people will be ok with it if it means less work for you.

You can set the sensitivity too, I think?

I guess it'll end up that way! But the "free" version is solution only... I don't want to put more money into this all.

Glad to see it back again!
We're back!

jasonjohn wrote: Mon 29 Sep 2025, 1:38 pm If you run the site through free Cloudflare CDN it can ask users to verify they're human, I think?

Annoying, but I'm sure people will be ok with it if it means less work for you.

You can set the sensitivity too, I think?

Yeah, set up Cloudflare DDoS protection.

TheGardner wrote: Mon 29 Sep 2025, 2:34 pm I guess it'll end up that way! But the "free" version is solution only... I don't want to put more money into this all.

Thanks for the update. If it gets to the point where more money is needed, it could be possible to do a donation drive here. You could put an unintrusive banner or note somewhere on the site similar to Wikipedia, just simply create a stickied thread explaining the situation.

Having this forum offline whilst a new album (albeit, compilation album) was announced wasn't ideal.
I think part of experiencing new releases is being able to read and contribute different impressions. It certainly adds to the overall experience, especially with the fanbase here who are often well-read and quite articulate. That combined with the strong dedication and commitment of these core fans, it makes for engaging commentary.
So I'm hoping we can shorten downtimes or eliminate them but oh well.

Quick update: at the moment the site is working fine from the IPs that did not work before, thank you

Yes it was down for me in Sydney for a few days, guess the naughty people used my netblock in their attacks.

Currently there are country bans working for CN, SG, half of Asia and mostly all Africa, Oceania and Antarctica. From what I see most of the accesses were done by GPTBot, which now was banned... Let's see how this will work out.

Issues with forum today again, now it seems to be working but only if you're logged in