Model Railway Forum

Hi All,

Thank you to all who have reported issues with accessing the forum at various times.

As you'll have seen in the board announcement, we are making some changes to the forum, which we hope will prevent these issues occuring.

I believe that the issue stems from the number of 'web-crawler' services accessing the site to copy its content. These services access the site as a guest, and copy all of the publicly available content for use in various data-harvesting tasks, notably training AI tools. These services are creating a 'drain' on the available resources of the forum server, and are possibly preventing access at some times.

We will be enabling 'CloudFlare' protection for the site to weed out these services. We maintain a list of known good services which will be allowed to scan the site, others will not be permitted.

For 99% of our users, you should not see any difference following the changes over the weekend. Some users *may* get an intermediary prompt to verify your connection.

We will also be resetting the 'most users online' figure once these changes are complete. Currently they include web-crawler services, which we do not want.

Please let me know if you experience any issues with the forum on Monday or after.

Regards,

Steve D.

Hi All,

Just an update on these issues... I've spent the week poking and tweaking settings to improve things, and from what I can see, it's much much better.

Disabling the Cloudflare popup did initially create a small surge in bot traffic, but I've now added rules to prevent these.

Basically, If you are accessing the site from the UK, Europe, US, Canada, or Australia, you shouldn't see a popup from Cloudflare, ever. If anywhere else, you will see an interactive prompt to prove you are human.

If anyone gets one of these prompts when accessing the site, please PM me, letting me know where you are connecting from. I don't want legitimate users being prompted, so I will alter the rules to allow you to access the site without a prompt.