Thank you, Jase!

Excellent work and thanks.

Yes, this. The clock has gone to the zoo.

Looks like they switched and attacked again.  Makes you wonder...

I've put in rate limits to prevent too many connection requests from one source.  They were attempted about 15,000 per second, have limited it to 1,000 for now and will probably go lower once I monitor it some more.

No idea why the time is off, I shall pick at that.

Thank you for your work!

Indeed, I'd like to add my thanks. DOS attacks suck.

In reply to jase (msg # 61):

Thank you Jace

 this is good to hear!. I have  stated on Many occasions , when i first started  PBP, there were  'EZboards'  i was in dozens of them, Playing   D&D  for the most part... they got hit  with some viruses, and  ever one of the crashed  and Burned. some Hackers   though it was  fun, i guess...EZboards, as a company, never returned.

I am glad   we weathered this storm, My players  were active, using the 'copy before sending' thing..they will be happier  now!..Thanks for all the hard  work!

Great stuff Jase and Team!  May a giant Dodo bird crapon the perpetrators head!

,,maybe some old time.medevil punishment, that would  render them unable  to use a keyboard  again!

I'm long glad to have a working site...sounds like some automated nonsense that's picked up on the 'profiles' category and is trying, pointlessly, to hack imaginary people to me, but that's not informed speculation. Anyway, many thanks for the update and more for the fix, both greatly appreciated.

Fantastic sleuthing (and other) work there Jase, much appreciated.


That doesn't strike me as extraordinarily likely, for several reasons, but I certainly share the sentiment. :D

I think it's just that there are very few things for games that are always public, the character profiles being one of them, so that's the only thing you can consistently attack.

In reply to _Snowdrop_ (msg # 78):

Right. They access public areas of the site over and over again very rapidly using bot programs. That kills the bandwidth and potentially crashes the site. Probably a bunch of hackers who infected a lot of people's PC's with the bot viruses. Those people thought that the PC was running slow because of Windows or something and didn't bother to run AV scans so their PC's might have been used to attack the site. DOS and DDOS attacks are just freakin' petty.

n’thing the sentiment of DDOS attacks being incredibly annoying

Great job finding and fixing. This is the best site ever. Cheers to all of you guys who keep it running.

Whew! Glad that's over. I hope I can speak for everyone else who makes use of this site for their regular RP and social interactions when I say, thanks for taking care of everything that keeps this site going.

To misquote a common saying in the 80's: I want my RPoL!

This could be an off the wall suggestion (my knowledge is extremely limited). But given the nature of the areas being targeted, could it be possible someone may have been trying to automate  some sort of mining of public facing content for an AI generator thing? I know they've become increasingly popular and someone who knew enough to be dangerous but not enough to reign in whatever bot they built might have mimicked a DDOS attack unintentionally (or intentionally).

Unless someone owns up we've unfortunately no way of knowing the reason behind it.  There's a few theories but I looked up the source addresses for the connections and they're HK IPs known for being malicious so I'm leaning that way.

I may now contradict myself but digging into the requests to the server I saw a large amount of requests coming from bots.  Not the ridiculous amount coming from the DDOS but still about 86% of the remaining requests were bots, and most where also hitting gameinfo.php.

The worst offenders are now blocked from hitting that page (SemrushBot, ByteSpider and ClaudeBot), that'll hopefully lighten the load on the server.  I'll continue to monitor the misbehaving bots and block them as necessary.

Time issue was also fixed yesterday so hopefully we'll soon forget all this ever happened...  (c;

Hey Jase, it the time thing completely fixed?  I don't know what the original problem was, but different pages of the site have different timestamps.  Like for example, at the top of this very page, RPoL tells me the time is "05:14, 3rd June 2024 (GMT-5)."  But if I click back to the home page, suddenly it's "04:14, 3rd June 2024 (GMT-6)," an hour apart.

Timestamp is working for me in Firefox on Win 10 PC - both thread and main page showing local time.

Though we don't have daylight saving where I am - which could explain a 1 hr time difference for others ?

Thanks for the update Jase!

Edit:
I live in NZ, timestamp of this post was 5min short of the time showing on my PC screen.
This message was last edited by the user at 10:29, Mon 03 June.

Ooooh, right, I do notice now that one of those timestamps shows me in GMT-5 and the other in GMT-6.  Looks like one of them isn't recognizing DST here in the US maybe?

Someone who got kicked out for breaking the rules? Sort of bad-tempered thing a kid would do.

Thanks for getting it back to normal. Love this site.

Not sure there was a specific target. At the same time this site was targeted another site (mostly involved with collecting old media) was involved with a similar DDOS attack.