Recent website issues
Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2025 9:38 am
Hi all,
Over the past few days, you may have experienced some issues logging in and posting to the forum, I just wanted to take a moment to apologise for any inconvenience caused during this time!
The cause..
Occasionally the website has been encountering some significant slow downs, to the point the website becomes almost inaccessible. I narrowed this down to what I believe is attacks, either intentional or by rouge bot nets that are over-aggressively indexing the website. In response I swapped the sites DNS over to Cloudflare, where there are more tools available for restricting and checking incoming traffic, in an attempt to deal with the issue. I also turned on Cloudflare's "Attack mode" as the incoming attack was still active, which is why you may have seem the Robot checker page appear before the site loads, to verify your humanity! Although I did some initial testing and all seemed fine (I was able to login just fine and browse the website) it quickly became apparent through numerous reports that it was causing more problems than it had solved, with people being unable to login, to use the contact form, being logged out when trying to make a post etc..
Current solution..
The DNS is still running though Cloudflare, although there are many reports online of it not playing particularly nicely with the phpBB forum software this site is running, I am determined to work around this as Cloudflare is a globally recognised platform for securing websites and traffic. I have however turned off some of their "Nice to have" features such as caching and proxied DNS records, as these seem to be what was mostly incompatible with the forum. I've heard back from many people now stating that their issues are resolved, however I am still monitoring the situation.
If you have any issues, please do let me know - either by PM, the sites contact form or by directly emailing admin@rctankwarfare.co.uk
Many thanks for your continued patience and support through this time!
Kind regards,
Matt
Over the past few days, you may have experienced some issues logging in and posting to the forum, I just wanted to take a moment to apologise for any inconvenience caused during this time!
The cause..
Occasionally the website has been encountering some significant slow downs, to the point the website becomes almost inaccessible. I narrowed this down to what I believe is attacks, either intentional or by rouge bot nets that are over-aggressively indexing the website. In response I swapped the sites DNS over to Cloudflare, where there are more tools available for restricting and checking incoming traffic, in an attempt to deal with the issue. I also turned on Cloudflare's "Attack mode" as the incoming attack was still active, which is why you may have seem the Robot checker page appear before the site loads, to verify your humanity! Although I did some initial testing and all seemed fine (I was able to login just fine and browse the website) it quickly became apparent through numerous reports that it was causing more problems than it had solved, with people being unable to login, to use the contact form, being logged out when trying to make a post etc..
Current solution..
The DNS is still running though Cloudflare, although there are many reports online of it not playing particularly nicely with the phpBB forum software this site is running, I am determined to work around this as Cloudflare is a globally recognised platform for securing websites and traffic. I have however turned off some of their "Nice to have" features such as caching and proxied DNS records, as these seem to be what was mostly incompatible with the forum. I've heard back from many people now stating that their issues are resolved, however I am still monitoring the situation.
If you have any issues, please do let me know - either by PM, the sites contact form or by directly emailing admin@rctankwarfare.co.uk
Many thanks for your continued patience and support through this time!
Kind regards,
Matt