TromboneChat

Hi all,

Couple of you have mentioned this to me and I haven't had a chance to get back to everyone yet. There's been a pretty high sustained usage by bots today, which are somehow getting past the Cloudflare stuff I have setup. Today has been pretty bad, which is why people have been seeing the Cloudflare page occasionally throughout the day.

I've just put in a few additional mitigations in place, which has significantly dropped the traffic from such bots. I'll keep my eye on this. I have a few additional tweaks I'm going to try throughout the week as the site is still not quite as performant as I'd like anyhow. Stay tune more updates, I might have to take the site down mid week for a little bit to do a test on another change.

I was not able to access TC for about 8 hours today. Cloudfare "approved" me ... then nothing; timed out.

We were having hundreds of simultaneous scraping queries. It never got down to less than 146 simultaneous queries, so most users were getting drowned out with bot traffic.

I just made another change that seems to really have picked up performance.. knock wood.

Matt K wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 6:53 pm We were having hundreds of simultaneous scraping queries. It never got down to less than 146 simultaneous queries, so most users were getting drowned out with bot traffic.

I just made another change that seems to really have picked up performance.. knock wood.

Same here. Tried to access the site throughout the day without success.

Posaunus wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 6:49 pm I was not able to access TC for about 8 hours today. Cloudfare "approved" me ... then nothing; timed out.

+1 I had the same experience.

It bears repeating that your efforts in maintaining this site are greatly appreciated. Also adding a plug for folks to donate to help with the hosting fees and the time and labor!

Thanks for all your work on this issue and on the forum! Dealing with tech problems can be frustrating, and too often all you hear about are the problems. I know you need to hear about the problems to solve them, but I wanted to make sure you know your efforts are appreciated.

Chazzer69 wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 11:24 pm It bears repeating that your efforts in maintaining this site are greatly appreciated. Also adding a plug for folks to donate to help with the hosting fees and the time and labor!

I will also chime in and plug the people making donations - they help make all this possible.

Is it normal to have cloud fare human check every time you get on??

jpwell wrote: Tue Aug 12, 2025 7:58 pm Is it normal to have cloud fare human check every time you get on??

If I don't post for about 15 minutes I get a Cloudflare check. And yes, every time I log on.

More worrisome is selecting “New posts” returns everything from August 2 on, regardless of what I’ve read. Clearing cookies and signing off of each session does not change this for me.

KWL wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2025 6:24 am More worrisome is selecting “New posts” returns everything from August 2 on, regardless of what I’ve read. Clearing cookies and signing off of each session does not change this for me.

Strange. Logging out just fixed this for me. Perhaps I was just closing the browser rather than actually logging out of the forum. Insert Roseanne Roseannadanna quote here.

Ken

KWL wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2025 6:32 am

KWL wrote: Wed Aug 13, 2025 6:24 am More worrisome is selecting “New posts” returns everything from August 2 on, regardless of what I’ve read. Clearing cookies and signing off of each session does not change this for me.

Strange. Logging out just fixed this for me. Perhaps I was just closing the browser rather than actually logging out of the forum. Insert Roseanne Roseannadanna quote here.

Ken

Is logging out really "the fix"? Didn't have to do that before. Is there some new setting I have to change? At the moment, I don't log out, like I never did before, but it worked seemingly as at should before. Now, I 've got supposedly 9 pages of "New Posts"... and as it stands, I only recognise when I^ve already read something, when I read it again...

musicofnote wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 11:51 am Now, I 've got supposedly 9 pages of "New Posts"... and as it stands, I only recognise when I^ve already read something, when I read it again...

I have 9 pages of unread topics, but it doesn't bother me. I can tell when I've already read a post because of the color of the hyperlink (and if you follow an already-read link, it takes you to the first post instead of the last). But I do wonder if my 9 pages (and growing) query imposes a load on the server. If everyone eventually starts receiving 100-page lists, that might bog things down.

Logging out and back in again fixed the endless new posts for me too

I tried a different variation on logging out/in. While logged in both on my phone and PC (Firefox), I launched my rarely-used Chrome and logged in/out. That cleared the 11-page list in my still-open sessions.

Huh. The new post list just keeps growing, even after previously logging out and back in again. So it seems the only way to keep it current is to keep logging out and back in again.

Matt K wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 6:46 pmThere's been a pretty high sustained usage by bots today, which are somehow getting past the Cloudflare stuff I have setup.

I just stumbled across this TC mirror that was mixed in with google search results. It is using a weird and invalid "test.trombonechat.com" certificate.

https://bizdaarzon.uz/index.php

Oh yeaaahh that’s actually not the mirror. Thanks for pointing that out I need to remove that entry

I've had one cloudfare pop up today.

I get the occasionally check the box to prove your human prompt, but I'm on a VPN almost 24/7...phone or PC... Even Google searches have me checking a box regularly...

No complaints from me. Forum has been funxtioning well. Appreciate the work y'all put in.

Unrelated question. Is Josh still apart of the web team? IIRC, he is a web developer and had helped with the forum in the past. That may had just been the old TTF days.

BPBasso wrote: Sat Oct 04, 2025 6:35 pm I've had one cloudfare pop up today.

I get the occasionally check the box to prove your human prompt, but I'm on a VPN almost 24/7...phone or PC... Even Google searches have me checking a box regularly...

No complaints from me. Forum has been functioning well. Appreciate the work y'all put in.

I now get regular Cloudfare pop-ups, but it's really not an issue - usually resolved within ~10 seconds.

In order to clear the lengthy "New posts" list, I now frequently Logout ([-> in upper right corner below Search box) and immediately Login again. Takes less than 15 seconds, and empties the list.

I'm grateful for everything Matt K has done to keep the Site working so well!

Hm that's dissapointing that's still happening. I thought for sure something I did may have fixed that... I'll keep digging. I should have a little more time now, my band just had our first gig, so I'm going to be doing much less writing. Turns out I wrote about five hours of music, so the ~ three-hour maximum is quite comfortable to fill Have one more gig coming up next week that I'm trying to finish up one more arrangement for. If anyone is going to be near norther WV and wants to come out for that hit me up and I'll give you some details!

I sometimes use a Google search that includes "site:trombonechat.com", but I've done several searches that failed to find even my own posts. Has anyone else noticed this doesn't work very well anymore? I guess there are drawbacks to blocking the bots.

That's correct. I've made a few attempts at letting in bots, but as soon as I do, we get 100x+ the amount of normal traffic. Google has been historically pretty good but when I let "Google" in, it appears that either Google itself has changed (possibly due to those AI responses that they put now) or someone is masquerading as "Google".

I'm actually working on this now as I type, actually. I'm on the tail end of working something out, but it won't be ready for about a week. Net result should be allowing the bots back in, as they'll never actually interact with the site, only read - so that it will go back to the performance we had roughly before AI started scourging the internet for actual humans and still allow the site to be indexed.