I am aware (and frustrated by) the SQL error problem that is occuring lately and affecting the forum pages and some other database driven components on site. This IS being currently looked into and will be resolved shortly. Sorry, but this happening over the weekend does not help - expect some intermittent problems until I report back to say that all issues have been taken care of.

Hi Deb - I have been able to log on this morning (Monday 17 March). Have you been able to resolve the issues with the SQL problem?

Best wishes as ever. Ed

Hi again Deb - I have just written a post in the Mundane section of the forum. It seemed to go ok. I only got the SQL message once but I could get straight back in. The situation seems to be improving.

Ed

Was able to login and post before hitting an SQL error, fingers the problem is close to a permanent fix. Hope you haven't pulled out all your hair, what a headache! Feel for you.

Thanks for the friendly messages and emails - and Therese, the info you passed on (about the ridiculous number of views the forum was getting) proved very useful. I am hopeful we have cracked this problem now, although some details are still being filtered through and might take up to 48 hours to fully implement.

The problem was a massive overload of non-human traffic - forum posts that should have been getting 10s or 20s of views per day were getting about 15000 views per day. This was the result of overly aggressive A.I. data collection - a problem more and more websites are experiencing - see this link for info:


AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites

SourceHut, an open source git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data.

"SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers," the biz reported Monday on its status page. "We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of mitigations which are keeping the problem contained for now. However, some of our mitigations may impact end-users."

Yet another reason for me to continue my loud complaints about how much A.I, and I, do not get on!

Hi Deb - thanks for the huge effort to resolve this issue. It must have been a lot of work to get to the bottom of this. It sounds like this data mining activity is quite pernicious in many ways, even beyond the issues around intellectual property ownership and copyright.

Thanks for everything you do for the astrological community. This site and the forum are such an important resource for us.

Best wishes. Ed

I want to thank too. It is helpful for me to know the reason for the problem, so that I can protect my photo blog.

hi deb

i too would like to voice my appreciation for all your are doing here behind the scenes.. i saw your note on the weekend and appreciate all you are doing! cheers james

I'm also seeing a bunch of spam bot posts. It might be a good time for everyone to update their passwords for safety. Someone hacked my account a while ago and I had to ask Deb for a recovery via email.

Mercury retro and combust nonsense! The tricksters are in hiding and doing their worst.

The last couple of days have been bad for spammer activity so I am going to close the forum to new registrations for a while, until I can be confident the drive can be kept out. In the meantime, if anyone wants to open a new account, email me personally using the email contact in the footer.

great idea! thanks deb! it is unfortunate this extra layer of work as a result of this recent invasion...

Thank you Deb for handling this issue!

Ouranos