I am not sure if it is my internet or not but I am getting a 504 Gateway Time-out when trying to click into my games

I had it temporarily. Seems fine now.

Thank you!

Welcome.

In reply to silverelf (msg # 1):

Usually not on rpol I don't.

I've been getting them for the past two days on 3 different browsers.

I've been getting 502, 504, and 505 errors over the past few days.

Been getting mostly 502. While the site itself and the thread overview of games load just fine, all other pages (individual threads, PMs, character details, etc.) seem to take 10+ seconds to render every time as well, even when no errors occur.

Got some 502 messages for about an hour yesterday, seems fine now.

Edit: ironically, got a 502 when posting this, although the post did go through.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:19, Wed 29 May.

got a coup0le the last 2  days?..one  cost me a Massive  GM post.. the   pages  are taking a bit longer to load.

I've been getting 504 errors too, earlier on today, though it's mostly just running slow at the moment when viewing individual threads within games/forums. The numbers at the bottom of the page show generation time is fine, it's rendering time that's the issue, which I think jase once suggested could be browser related, but I'm getting the same delay in both Firefox and Edge on Windows 10 PC, all with latest patches.

I just ran a traceroute checking rpol.net and google.com and it's definitely running slow betwixt my computer and rpol when compared to google, though it's timing out at a few of the interim steps, not at either end.  From what little I know of such things, that suggests to me that it's a problem in one or more of the servers it's passing through en route.

jase hasn't advised of any recent code updates to rpol, and if the issue is occurring across browsers (/OS ?) that suggests it's not the browser either ... which leaves either the servers en route as traceroute says (or possibly the server that rpol sits on, though I can't see why that'd cause delays en route).

Which I guess means it should magically get better - fingers crossed !  ;>

Not sure it will help with diagnosis but, I get the errors on my Android phone, iPad, and Windows PC using Firefox.

::chuckles:: , i got a   502, for my first post after  answer8ing above. ..i made a couple posts  since  and they posted, but a bit slow. I hope it works  out.. I have a friend , around my age that  has been going to sites   about 'sunspots  and  solar flares"..who knows?

Same here, have been getting a lot of 502 errors today; reloading the page eventually makes it work, but even then rendering times are very long - example: this very page took 12.944 seconds to render, despite only 0.092 to generate - and using different browsers didn't help.

yep..just got another  502  in a game a few seconds ago.. good thing  i copied the post...man . i hope this works out quickly.

Been slow last couple days, maybe server or site needs a re-start?

UK here, it's slow, interspersed with 502.

I had a post written, it gave me the 502, so I kept clicking the reload button, and eventually the message was sent, even if I no longer had it visible - so in that sense you shouldn't need to copy the post, just don't leave the page. Although this was on PC, don't know if that works for mobile.

Also, perhaps worth noting, whenever I quote something, it opens the message window, and then it takes something like thirty seconds before the text I have quoted appears within the writing box - I can start writing in an empty box, and then the quoted text will appear in-between words. It's bizarre, but I'm not sure if it's related to the other problems, or something that's happening just to me.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:49, Wed 29 May.

UK based user here and I'm getting regular 502 errors whenever I open something within a game.

  yeah? I don't know what the heck..it scares me , because  years ago, before i came here a site died  with stuff like this happening. I don't want to see this  crash

I get no delays or errors opening the home page, or opening a game or a forum to see the thread listings, it's only when I try to open an individual thread that I see long delays (like ~10 seconds) and the occasional 502 Bad Gateway error.  Not sure why they'd be different, but it's very consistent.

I think it has the same delay as the rest of the site rendering, so somewhere between 10~20 seconds minimum.

It seems to me that whenever we try to access something stored within the game directories, it stutters and slows down, even if we're already accessing that directory. Not a programmer and I have no idea how the site is set up, but what I imagine is that "folders"/directories are fine, but individual "files" are loading slowly. This would affect quoting, as it needs to go grab it from a "file." Maybe something goes wrong when it tries to "read"/"write"?

In favor of a reset or a hard poke to the hosting service :)
This message was last edited by the user at 14:58, Wed 29 May.

Yeah, I'm only getting the massive slow downs and 502 errors when opening game messages and private messages. Hopefully someone can give the server some coffee and wake it up.

Same.   I don't know how their cgi scripts and if it uses some sort of database that's having issues

In reply to aguy777 (msg # 23):

Same here, getting 502 Bad Gateway error or long delays when opening anything in rpol today.

And now I intended to quote post 23, fut it fails to quote it (though I could quote in games proper)

No errors, but it's been very slow all day. I can get to the home page easily enough, but going any deeper takes a good bit of time.

Had a timeout today when posting a message. Thankfully, refreshing the timeout page allowed the post to go through.

That said, opening threads within a forum or a game has been sluggish for me; I haven't noticed sluggishness entering a forum (like General RPOL), though.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:53, Thu 30 May.

502s that refreshing seems to (slowly) bypass here.

RPOL has been sluggish and getting slower for a while.   And yes, I got a 504 error today while trying to make a post.

RPOL is running at dial-up speeds. Had a 502 timeout twice when I was granting a removal request. Second time went through, but the site being so sluggish is annoying.

I always think that it's nice to know you're not alone with these things.  Makes us more of a family! :-)

not only that.. I cleran out my machine 2 or three times  a week,,did  deep scans  ect ect, thinking it  was me. Its nice to know   that it  wasn't just me.

My pages are taking 10-15 seconds to load, and I'm reminded about the joke where your dad talks about how everything was better in the old days when you had to take your time with things, and yet he yells at the microwave, "Come on already!"

Not to 'me too' things but I've been getting alternately 504's and 502s for most of the time I've tried to post today.

it's been going on the last 2+ days, but noticeably worse the last day and a half or so. tbh pretty painful at this point w/ 10-20sec lags. seems like a serverside slowdown. if site admins are able, might not be a bad idea to reach out to the hosting service and see if they can reboot the host server or smth.

West coast of Canada: I've noticed the slow page loads for 2 or 3 days at least. Occasional gateway error when posting.

This is definitely NOT a browser issue! :-D

Have the site admins said anything?

No.  Skald has posted in this thread, so the mods are aware of the issue and have presumably made Jase aware, but I don't believe any additional official information on the issue has been given.

Another thing that seems affected is RSS feeds? Mine usually seems to run at 20-minute intervals and pick up new posts then, but it's only caught a fraction of the updates/new replies the past few days.

And, as soon as I posted yesterday that I'd been slow, but error free, I start getting 502 errors.

Usually stuff like this is fixed the Tuesday after a long weekend. Kind of makes me wonder what things at like for/at the hosting service right now.

it worries me... I wish we still had the old server to fall back on, until this gets  fixed.

For what it's worth, I've noticed that the more pages I have open, the worse it is. And I'm running  a game where we are in the middle of combat, and the players never send in the needed information, so I have: the post I'm working, the player's input post, the character sheet, and the die roller all open, sometimes more. That's at least 4 pages, just to cut down on wait time cycling between them.

And that's when I started getting error messages. It probably doesn't mean anything, but...

I tried to answer a PM  with a Player in my space game, as to what she wanted to do with an encounter, it took be  4  shots  , to get through.

I have been getting the same errors as well, but my posts have been going through at least so I haven't lost anything.

Yeah, a player in my game lost her post and I nearly lost mine, but had the sense to first type it up in a notepad.  I hope it gets fixed soon because it's getting a bit worse :(

i told  all my players  to  Copy the  post. you can  go back  to the  thread. sometimes the post will be there, or you can just paste it again.

Yeah, that's the worst bit.  I could take the slow loading, but having had a page timeout eat a post already makes the current situation another level of annoying.

so i did a bit more digging - on a tracert, everything's fine until the hops hit hurricane electric. after that, a ton of timeouts as it tries to route through different avenues before finally making it through.

definitely looks like a serverside problem. if site mods are monitoring this thread, is it possible to talk to the hosting service and see if they can reboot their servers or otherwise do something about this lag?

I sent an rMail, after getting a 502 error the first time, to jase and all the mods and linked this thread.
Hopefully they can get this sorted.

We monitor everything using techniques patented by Santa himself !  And I'm glad someone can make sense of the traceroute - I just know that timeouts are bad.   :>

All I can tell you is that we've sent the details of the problem on to jase and we're waiting for him to check, advise, contact the hosting service etc etc.  When there's more news either he or we will let you know OR it'll have all been fixed up first, and 502/504 will just be a bad memory to scare first level PCs with ("you call that a Slow spell ?!!).

As I noted in my first comment on here, I'm reminded of dial-up connection days. It's annoying, but it definitely indicates a problem somewhere.
We need a Strength + Repair roll somewhere.

A 14.4 baud dial-up modem at that!

I do hope we see a resolution soon. This is getting rather tedious. The only "Bad Gateway" I want meddling in my games is that one that transports the party to the lower planes...

I was thinking my broadband was having problems.  A lot of us remember the huge breakdown in 2005 I believe?  Any time it gets this bad those golden oldies of us cringe.  But heyho it is what it is and I assure you whatever it is that Jase and his great team are on it.  Is it annoying, maddening, frustrating by all means yes!  But have we seen it before … yes!  Will we see it again … most likely YES!!  But we are all in this together. ;)

 My players  are using  my  suggestion to coly the posts   and then paste it if the 502  hits...the 'wait time ' is crazy..but   we keep the games  moving as best we can..sooner or later  , we'll come out the other side.

In reply to donsr (msg # 55):

due to some concerns about my own computer (an old piece of junk), I use to do just that (making my posts in a word document, and then copy and paste here) even when the board works better.

The main difficulty I find now is the fact I cannot quote texts, at least with the Quote button. Am I the only one having this problem too?

The quoted text will show up….eventually. I have started clicking the quote button, going to work on something else for a minute and then come back to finish the reply. Of course, after copying said quote into a doc in case it all gets eaten by the 502.

In reply to Lluis (msg # 56):

You can do the quote manually.

Copy and paste the text, re-add any formatting (such as colored text) and then add the <quote Character_name> before the text and </quote> after it.

After 826 days (and 9 hours) it was time for a reboot.  Some of the pages (.cgi ones, i.e. Perl) are slow so I'll continue to investigate that.

Yay, thanks for working on it!

If it helps, I had a few loads come up quick (<1sec) after the reboot. But most are still sitting in the 10-15sec mark like before.

Super glad this is getting looked into though. We have faith in you, admin!

Should be much better now.  Someone was sending over a million requests each day to various games (the game information pages to be precise; generally the cast and viewing character descriptions).

Basically it seemed to be a "denial of service attack".  The IPs in use are known for being bad "actors" and they've been blocked (at the firewall) from requesting more pages from RPoL.. ever again.

No idea why we were targeted and doubt we ever will.  Thanks for your patience.

Definitely a massive immediate improvement, thanks much Jase!

No way, early on I thought for a millisecond this felt like a DDOS attack but then dismissed it as an insane notion. Like who tf would DDOS an RP site? Then again, given the drama and meltdowns I've seen happen over RP, I guess it's entirely plausible 😅

Thanks Jase. Glad the molasses era has ended!

Thank you so much for fixing it! Hope they stay gone <3

Appreciated Jase, hopefully that’s not added too much to the running costs but happy to donate to help cover if so

One observation since the reboot: the time appears to be 5-7 minutes behind what I would expect it to be on reloading the main page?

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.