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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by vtsteam on October 10, 2025, 10:27:06 AM »Bots are slamming now for forum membership. In just 9 hours this morning alone:
Recent Posts
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by vtsteam on October 10, 2025, 10:16:54 AM »Thanks Eric (and Ade). Back online again here. 
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by AdeV on October 10, 2025, 04:30:39 AM »I have downloaded a patch and will try to upgrade things this week.
Eric
Hey Eric,
You might find you're being scraped by a million bots originating in Singapore - both MEM & Lister Engine Forum have had that issue - I've ended up firewalling the whole of Singapore just to try to stop it (it's worked... for now....). There's also a bunch of scraper bots operating out of Brazil, unfortunately that's harder to handle as we (and I suspect here too) have some legit Brazilian users...
On & off I'm working on an IP/location based blocker, but progress is being hampered by my day job, and my PHP knowledge being rustier than a British classic car...
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by awemawson on October 10, 2025, 03:20:55 AM »Thanks Eric for all your hard work..
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Announcements & Issues / ANNNNND we are back
« Last post by Brass_Machine on October 10, 2025, 01:39:17 AM »On a new host. Slightly upgraded forum software.
I will be upgrading us again shortly...
hope not too many things are broken.
Eric
I will be upgrading us again shortly...
hope not too many things are broken.
Eric
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by Brass_Machine on October 07, 2025, 10:14:29 AM »I have downloaded a patch and will try to upgrade things this week.
Eric
Eric
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by Brass_Machine on October 07, 2025, 10:07:46 AM »Yup. The site is having issues. I keep having to reboot the server... I don't have a lot of time at the moment, so I have not been able to troubleshoot. I will get this fixed. Eventually.
Sorry.
Eric
Sorry.
Eric
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by vtsteam on October 06, 2025, 05:54:35 PM »I had one time yesterday whan I couldn't log in. But I'm not surprised, because other fora I'm on have had much worse problems for loggins and slowdowns ongoing for the last couple months or more. The reason is AI bot scrapers for every competing version of generative AI are hitting anything of interest on the web to download. One forum site I frequent had 24,000 hits in a day and that shut it down completely until the server could be reconfigured. It's getting crazy. Everybody wants to make money off of AI, or their version of it.
Honestly I do wonder how much longer the Internet will be useful for anything. Hard to imagine it in 3 years with all the financial and geopolitical competition when AI becomes more and more sophisticated. Throw in AI hacker bots, AI generated viruses, AI spoofing and AI identity mimicking and deceptions, it'll be interesting times to say the least!
Back to brick and mortar stores, and pen and paper communications. Time to load up on USPS "Forever" stamps
Honestly I do wonder how much longer the Internet will be useful for anything. Hard to imagine it in 3 years with all the financial and geopolitical competition when AI becomes more and more sophisticated. Throw in AI hacker bots, AI generated viruses, AI spoofing and AI identity mimicking and deceptions, it'll be interesting times to say the least!
Back to brick and mortar stores, and pen and paper communications. Time to load up on USPS "Forever" stamps
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by tom osselton on October 06, 2025, 05:18:19 PM »Same here
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The Water Cooler / Re: Access to Madmodder
« Last post by kayzed1 on October 06, 2025, 05:07:43 PM »Same from North Wales...i am in tonight thou.