[CyberFreak]

Hey!

As you may or may not be aware, we have ben offline for most of the past 5-6 hours. Unfortunately it was due to our site being flooded with thousands of requests basically overloading the site and preventing legitimate users (like you!) from being able to load the site. We have taken steps to mitigate this and the site should be loading alot better now.

Unfortunately a side effect of the changes we had to make to block this malicious traffic may mean that legitimate users may be blocked/have difficulty accessing the site on some devices. If you encounter any issues, please email me at cyberfreak@duck.com with details on what device you are accessing the site and browser and version and I will try and get you back into FC as quick as possible. Likewise if you are aware of another user having issues, please send them the above email and ask them to contact us.

Sorry for the inconvenience and hopefully the site is back to normal again for everyone

Enjoy the rest of your week

Cyberfreak

[mrki444]

Why would somebody attack on forum? What is reason? Maybe hosting provider opponent attack all domains hosted on server?
I don't see what you can get from malicious traffic
Maybe Fords8 or Mr.B attack competition forum?

[CyberFreak]

There are alot of possibilities but it is incredibly likely to just be a random thing. These things happen to all sorts of sites for a range of reasons. Just to be a nuisance or even trying to scrap a site to copy content. We don’t know what the motives are really but it is not the first time and it won’t be the last.

[mrki444]

Maybe somebody test tool for attack on random forum to test protection or bot features like change ip. Does Forumcoin have Cloudflare protection?

If they want scrap content they do it without so agressive attack. Few different ip's would be enough. Few years ago I manage with free tool scrap text and images without any damage on website.

[ptrikha21]

I hope that the site has responded to the issues and things are back to normal now.
However, I think you would have to test or get some required test done for Site security.
May be use some Tools to enhance the site security.

Best of wishes from my side.

[Fergal]

We have just started with Cloudflare and switched the ForumCoin domain name servers to them. The change can take up to 24 hours to come into effect. Hopefully, we won't have any issues or downtime in the meantime.

Thanks everyone for your help and support.

[Spontaneo]

Dear @CyberFreak and @Fergal,

I am attempting to figure out the new changes. Are we going to be able to work as usual or what changes to expect? For example, we now need to verify if we are humans.

Any explanations would be appreciated.

Thank you.

[CyberFreak]

Hi,

When visiting for the first time that session. You will see a Cloudflare page that does some checks to make sure you are human. Most times it will last a couple of seconds and then redirect you. You may have to tick a box to confirm you are human and then you will be redirected. You shouldn’t have to go through that again that browsing session. If you don’t view FC for a little while, you might see the check again. It is only a few seconds delay but at the moment it is stopping most of the abusive traffic and keeping the site fast and online for everyone. While the attack is ongoing, you will see that page however when the attack subsides we will disable that check and it will go back to how it was. When you get pass the check, the site should function as it always has done but if not let us know. Unfortunately it is a downside to running sites on small budgets as so much traffic is non human nowadays however having the resources to handle thousands of requests a minute or to filter out the non human traffic effectively and silently is costly but we try and do what we can to keep the site online, fast and secure as best as we can.

[Spontaneo]

Hi,

When visiting for the first time that session. You will see a Cloudflare page that does some checks to make sure you are human. Most times it will last a couple of seconds and then redirect you. You may have to tick a box to confirm you are human and then you will be redirected. You shouldn’t have to go through that again that browsing session. If you don’t view FC for a little while, you might see the check again. It is only a few seconds delay but at the moment it is stopping most of the abusive traffic and keeping the site fast and online for everyone. While the attack is ongoing, you will see that page however when the attack subsides we will disable that check and it will go back to how it was. When you get pass the check, the site should function as it always has done but if not let us know. Unfortunately it is a downside to running sites on small budgets as so much traffic is non human nowadays however having the resources to handle thousands of requests a minute or to filter out the non human traffic effectively and silently is costly but we try and do what we can to keep the site online, fast and secure as best as we can.

Hello @CyberFreak,

Thank you for explaining. I simply could not log in and unaware that there would be changes. So, I wanted to pull my hair out because I thought that the problem was my fault and my laptops' fault. I did not mean to blow up your email inbox and @Fergal's email inbox.

Thank you again!

Have a good afternoon.

[W.F]

did you go with the free plan or pro just out of my own interest? I went with pro and that did the trick also has imagecache for better speed optimisation.

--- 13 Oct 2025, 13:04 ---

have you seen anymore downtime since going to cloudflare?

[CyberFreak]

We were being flooded with requests from thousands of IP addresses globally which was overwhelming the site by saturating our CPU allowance meaning that everything would go to a crawl for legit users aswell as the attack traffic due to the backlog of reqests. Image caching etc would not have helped. We had to prevent the traffic from hitting the server as it was the php processing and database queries using up the CPU. We are using the free plan. We did eventually block most of the traffic and the attack stopped after a while when what was getting through wasn’t taking down the site anymore.

[W.F]

We were being flooded with requests from thousands of IP addresses globally which was overwhelming the site by saturating our CPU allowance meaning that everything would go to a crawl for legit users aswell as the attack traffic due to the backlog of reqests. Image caching etc would not have helped. We had to prevent the traffic from hitting the server as it was the php processing and database queries using up the CPU. We are using the free plan. We did eventually block most of the traffic and the attack stopped after a while when what was getting through wasn’t taking down the site anymore.

noted!

whats the difference between free plan and pro plan