OccultForum.org

Cerber wrote: Mon Oct 13, 2025 3:54 pm Yes, something like that. Most of the time they just come in bursts, in waves, flooding website with requests. Some of them identify themselves, others don't, some of them throw thousands of requests from few IPs, others throw handful of requests from thousands of IP's, it varies, but the end result is often exhausted resources account/website (CPU&RAM), then nothing is left for server to use to generate and serve page for normal human visitors, if one happen to come at that time.
In a "shared" environments individual accounts (websites) have quotas set for resources, so if some individual website gets flooded by bots it shouldn't cause problems for the rest of the server, normally, but these days hosting providers oversell resources to such degree that server might have enough resources only for handful of sites to be very busy at the same exact time, so everything is fine only as long as bots and crawlers are not flooding multiple sites on the same machine, otherwise things escalate and deteriorate fast. Linux machines have that funky quirk were those tend to get very unresponsive if the whole machines runs out of RAM, and often need full reboot to recover, unless guys manage to deal with the issue in time. Our current host seem to be struggling a little, at times, server was rebooted at least twice already in a month, which is a lot imho.

That makes sense that it would be the site and/or the server if multiple sites were flooded. I wonder if site selection by these AIs/bots is just random brute force or if there are any selection criteria or something that keeps them returning to a specific site.

As for the AIs, I wonder what their purpose is if they're not spamming anything. Maybe they find something worthwhile on some occult forums to supplement their data centers/language models.

Anyway, from the activity I've seen over the past couple days it looks like you may have done something and that it is working; maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe you are blocking IP locations. I did notice once though that the guest count exceeded 300.

I've expanded block list with couple more entries 2 days ago.

Just to let everyone know, this coming weekend will "maintenance weekend", but I'm not going to actually put forum in maintenance mode, so forum remains fully fictional, to the most part at least, but there's possibility of something breaking, something stopping working at random times, briefly, without any advance warning.
So before actually posting any longer posts you might want copy of your text, because there will be non-zero chance of things temporarily breaking while you're typing.
From Friday until Sunday I'll be trying to resolve the last remaining issues, including issues with DMs.

Cerber wrote: Tue Oct 14, 2025 5:38 pm Just to let everyone know, this coming weekend will "maintenance weekend", but I'm not going to actually put forum in maintenance mode, so forum remains fully fictional, to the most part at least, but there's possibility of something breaking, something stopping working at random times, briefly, without any advance warning.
So before actually posting any longer posts you might want copy of your text, because there will be non-zero chance of things temporarily breaking while you're typing.
From Friday until Sunday I'll be trying to resolve the last remaining issues, including issues with DMs.

I come from a long lineage of defunct forums if that ends up being the case, and it's better to have something than nothing. This forum doesn't auto-save text like some of the writing forums anyway, so fumbling on the keyboard sometimes catapults unsubmitted text into oblivion, although the back/forward navigation arrows may recover it some of the time.

Lack of automatic draft saving always been a bit of a nuisance, but it's inherent default behaviour of phpbb boards. I find annoying annoying enough to look in to addressing that in some way, but a bit later.
First I need to clear everything of my immediate to-do list (pre-existing issues, bugs, post-migration issues, upgrade/update all core components, etc), and once everything neat and tidy and working as ancients intended it, then I'll look in to adding some minor "quality of life improvements".
I'll have a bit more free time in the coming few weeks, we'll have it all fixed.

Cerber wrote: Wed Oct 15, 2025 1:16 pm Lack of automatic draft saving always been a bit of a nuisance, but it's inherent default behaviour of phpbb boards. I find annoying annoying enough to look in to addressing that in some way, but a bit later.
First I need to clear everything of my immediate to-do list (pre-existing issues, bugs, post-migration issues, upgrade/update all core components, etc), and once everything neat and tidy and working as ancients intended it, then I'll look in to adding some minor "quality of life improvements".
I'll have a bit more free time in the coming few weeks, we'll have it all fixed.

I'm usually well into a post without thinking to copy to the clipboard, but writing in Wordpad is a good safeguard, so I just do that most of the time.

While I was chasing after some obscure ghostly bugs, I found what seems to be a fairly thick layer of artefact data in database, about two thirds in number of tables and about half in actual megabytes - is just a sedimentary layer of old data, from old defunct incarnations of this place, that's not being used in any way now.
Which got me thinking, that perhaps it's easier and better to just take time to catalogue what's needed and important and extract that and then rebuild forum on a clean new installation with data that is actually being used and is important, rather than keep on stacking more layers of duct tape.
But they say "don't fix what's not broken (very badly)", so not sure, still debating what's the best direction from here.

So do the timeline experiment:

- decide to rebuild - then project forward to Jan 2026 to feel if you are happy with that

- decide not to rebuild and again project forward to feel if you are happy with that

Amor wrote: Sun Oct 19, 2025 2:23 am So do the timeline experiment:

- decide to rebuild - then project forward to Jan 2026 to feel if you are happy with that

- decide not to rebuild and again project forward to feel if you are happy with that

Well if thinking like that..

- not to rebuild - then I feel, most likely I can eventually patch it all up, or at least to clear most of the bugs, but by the end I might be too exhausted for anything more, beyond just keeping in a working state for somebody else to take over, eventually, some years later on - so not particularly "happy",

- to rebuild - then I feel, it's going to be a lot of effort, and while at the end forum would be in a clean and working state, it will be ~99% the same, because it's quite a chore to get anything out of phpBB , beyond it's intended look, feel and function, and my motivation to battle with it is very limited - so maybe a little happier, but not massively so,

..but there's a third option: rebuild/migrate from phpBB to SMF (Simple Machines Forum) - that one looks so much nicer, if I could make it work on that, without anyone noticing too much of a difference, I'd be quite happy.

Actually, what do people prefer, based on all of your personal experience with other forums?
If we ignore things like general vibe of the community and content, etc, and just focus on the feel, aesthetics and usability of the platform, the application behind it, with which one you guys feel more at home with?

A: phpBB (used here now on occultforum.og),
B: SMF (as used by many other forums, ie: "wizardforums"),
C: Don't mind, either looks fine,
D: Something else entirely.

But please keep in mind, when it comes to aesthetics, all of the forums apps/platforms can be customised with themes, so switching to one or another doesn't necessarily mean it will look like some other forum, but few elements here and there might look similar. However functionality would be largely same, or very similar.

Re: Forum Considerations


1. Load speed: nothing lagging that I notice as of late.

2. Aesthetics: well structured; no harsh or glaring colors that are hard on the eyes.
The current theme satisfies all that.

3. Functionality: auto saving of unsubmitted text can be a useful feature at times but there are workarounds. A larger edit window would be nice for late caught errors, revisions, and replacing defunct videos; the worst are the mistakes noticed immediately after the window closes.

It would look better if the body text wrapped in the same container that the video is displayed but aligning center is an okay workaround for that.

This place isn't over-moderated which is good; other places are over-moderated circle jerks.

I wouldn't sacrifice load speed for aesthetics, but the forum software makes no difference to me. Participation is low but traffic seems okay. Nothing crucial worth mentioning at the moment.

CCoburn wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2025 5:45 pm 3. Functionality: auto saving of unsubmitted text can be a useful feature at times but there are workarounds. A larger edit window would be nice for late caught errors, revisions, and replacing defunct videos; the worst are the mistakes noticed immediately after the window closes.

In regard to timer for edits, I can extend it a bit, to 24h perhaps. Outside of that window, there's always option to DM me any edits anyone needs, I'm happy to do that. The point of that time is to mitigate certain types of spam and abuse.
Ideally, for long term, I think I'd prefer that feature to be permission/rank based, rather then having one global timer for all. At some point people can and should be trusted with it permanently, makes sense so. I suspect the only reason, or main reason, it's not so yet is "skill issue", to put it simply. Permissions system in phpbb is so convoluted, layered, overlapping, that nobody was able (or willing) to setup anything beyond just basic functionality.
The worst part, imho, even for some relatively "simple" configurations phpbb devs themselves suggest third party mods. Why would you give me a 500 pages and tabs, with 500 toggles and buttons in each, if at the end of the day, to get those buttons do something useful, I still need some third party mod installed?.. Drug abuse is a serious issue amongst programmers.
So anyway, that was one of the main reasons I was exploring alternatives to phpbb. But hard doesn't mean impossible, so whichever way we opt to roll, that issue with permissions and edit timers will be resolved in some more graceful way, ie "anyone with certain rank will have no limit on edit times".

Error: The requested page could not be found.


Tried posting a paper with a video and that's the error I got. I'll try posting a smaller piece and see if that works...

CCoburn wrote: Sun Oct 26, 2025 3:41 pm Error: The requested page could not be found.


Tried posting a paper with a video and that's the error I got. I'll try posting a smaller piece and see if that works...

Never mind. It's a problem with the post itself on my end.

Hard to say if it's relevant to the issue, but just for general reference, depending on the content POST'ed there always a small possibility something getting blocked either by antispam plugin (at the forum level), or by modsec (at the server level), but I'm not too keen on disabling either of those entirely unless there's really no workaround for some specific case.

I keep debugging this paper I wrote, but it keeps generating a page not found error. I think next I'm just going to try posting it in segments so I can narrow it down.

If it helps, feel free to create some separate thread just for testing, just mark it with some tag in the topic (ie "TESTING"), so it's clear what it's for and it doesn't get lost. I can remove when it's not needed any more.

Cerber wrote: Fri Oct 31, 2025 5:54 pm If it helps, feel free to create some separate thread just for testing, just mark it with some tag in the topic (ie "TESTING"), so it's clear what it's for and it doesn't get lost. I can remove when it's not needed any more.

Thanks, and I suppose I could do it either way. Right now it just causes a harmless error that results in the post not going through, although by doing it your way I could debug it in small segments and then repost as whole in the target thread. My way it would end up being four or five separate posts. Maybe like six or a half dozen since I don't really have much issue with breaking it up.

I've never had a post behave like this before, and the smaller pieces are going through fine. So far, I've tried replacing some of the lesser used characters like smart quotes, redoing font size tags so they don't span more than one line, posting only the first half of the paper, but no luck yet, so I think I'll just try breaking it up into even smaller pieces and see how that goes.

Just small notice, if anyone see occasional server errors today, tmrw (or whenever really) - just refresh page after few seconds, once or twice, and it should clear. There might be degraded performance periods as well, unfortunately.
Forum is currently dealing with some minor ddos event, but it's mostly mitigated, as much as reasonably possible.

Cerber wrote: Tue Nov 04, 2025 2:12 pm Just small notice, if anyone see occasional server errors today, tmrw (or whenever really) - just refresh page after few seconds, once or twice, and it should clear.

I'll try that next time. I keep reformatting segments and modifying phpBB HTML code and sometimes it works and other times I get "The requested page could not be found" error. I forgot we could actually delete posts here within a certain window. That's good since many forums only allow edits but not deleting an entire post.

Just adding another pair of HTML size tags on a second title causes: "The requested page could not be found" error. It doesn't make any sense really. The phpBB code parser is being a little fussy.

Active Topics


So you have two different interfaces whether you are signed in or not. It used to be that when you weren't signed in there was an active topics menu item on the index page that is no longer there. I wonder if that was intentionally removed or just incidental. It was an easy way to locate active threads without having to remember and track down through categories and titles or having to log in just to gain access to the active topics menu option.

It's temporary. Some features were disabled for "guest" users, as part of DDOS mitigation yesterday. It's somewhat subsided now, after ~10 million IPs blocked, but I'll give it another day or so, before reinstating those functions.

Cerber wrote: Wed Nov 05, 2025 7:54 pm It's temporary. Some features were disabled for "guest" users, as part of DDOS mitigation yesterday. It's somewhat subsided now, after ~10 million IPs blocked, but I'll give it another day or so, before reinstating those functions.

..scratch that, looks like "temporary" might take a while longer than few days.
I might have to implement regional blocks to mitigate all the issues.

got some "upgrades" to deal with the horde, things seems quite a bit better now, but we'll see how it holds over the next few days.