Hi,
We had a DDOS attack against old.lemmy.today which overloaded the entire server for about 20 minutes. I had to turn off old.lemmy.today temporarily and will look through logs and probably block more chinese ip ranges, since thats where it came from.
Always something to do. :) Keeping this as sticky for a while to inform everyone.
Edit: I added more ip blocks for Chinese networks and hopefully it will keep future bots away. Bringing up the old.lemmy.today user interface again…
Edit 2: Had to take it down again due to massive bot scraping. Currently down.
Edit 3: Decided to require login for old.lemmy.today instead of using anubis.
thanks a lot for keeping this instance running without cloudflare stuff, really appreciate it…
Thank you!
I dont want cloudflare either. :)
First, thank you for all the hard work you do.
Second, as someone still struggling to understand lemmy, one of the reasons I’m not a fan of old.lemmy.world is that I have to turn on cloudflare.
I have noscript running and I have cloudlflare blocked.
Your response implies otherwise that you don’t have cloudflare running either.
So why am I always greeted with cloudflare when I visit old.lemmy.world?
Edit: Oh I misread the title. Its old.lemmy.today that you’re talkinga bout, not old.lemmy.world.
My goof. Please ignore my post, but do take my gratitude.
Edit 2: So I went over to old.lemmy.today. It is tempting to switch. I like the default interface and it has content from a lot of places (on quick glance). One of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of old.slrpnk.net is that I can’t figure out how to access content from other instances. I seem tempted to switch.
You are very welcome if you do. Its the same content in old.lemmy.today as lemmy.today, just a different look. :)
I dont like cloudflare so doing my best to avoid it if I can.
Hi,
I’m sorry to bother you again (I waited a week before messaging you), but I wanted to check in on something. Last weekend, I wasn’t able to access old.lemmy.world.
Around Tuesday or so, I could access the site, but I can’t see any comments. I always get a 403 Forbidden error (with the words nginx at the bottom).
Is this is a problem on my end that I can fix?
Yeah, we had to require an account to use the old.lemmy.today site. So just create an account and log in. :)
Hi I just wanted to follow up on something
Since last evening, I can’t access old.lemmy.today (I can still access lemmy.today but that’s not an interface I like).
Are you having bot issues again or is there something I messed up on my end?
Now it should work well again. I put it behind anubis and we will see if it improves the situation with the bots.
Thanks, and again, keep up the good work!
I’m so sorry to constantly pester you, but I have another question.
I’ve been enjoying old.lemmy.today for the past few days. The biggest praise I can give it: I haven’t missed reddit at all, and the smaller community actually makes it feel like an upgrade. Like the reddit of old.
But I wanted to make an account on Lemmy.today to make a post, however to register it seems I need an email address.
I don’t want to give an email address. I could give a disposable one from one of those sites, but that would be obvious (to what it sounds like is a human curation process).
I know you said its to ward off bots, I’m wondering if its a temporary pause, or if its a permanent policy?
It’s fine to not give an email address. It’s just for the email to let you know that you were approved or denied. So if you put something random there and check if you can login later, it’s all good.
I think it’s even optional to give it… You can try registering without. :)
Cool thank you so much!
So just as an update, I checked both old.lemmy.today and lemmy.today; both seem to require an email address.
On lemmy.today is explicitly says email is required. On old.lemmy.today I tried fiddling around with various entries in the email field such as na, not_applicable, etc, but that didn’t seem to work either.
Is there something obvious I’m missing?
It was down overnight and today im working on trying to get anubus to work with it, so it will be unstable… :)
seems like it’s working again but with anubis… maybe can we just have something like http basic auth with a public password? (like have the password prompt as “type lemmy”)
i don’t think anubis is a good solution. it’s very trivially bypassed though maybe good enough to block stupid generic bots…
see also https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html
Ok now its working and seemingly blocking bots, but we will see over time how well this works. Like you said, im sure its possible to bypass but maybe it improves the situation somewhat still.
Its not really working yet, it keeps popping up the “seeing if you are a bot” message all the time.
But yeah, working on it. If it can prevent dumb bots, its a win for sure.
old.slrpnk.net should still have posts from other instances, as far as I can tell. They only show local stuff by default, so you have to set “listing” to “all” to see them (the small toggle under the yellow tagline). If you want to primarily interact with posts from other instances, lemmy.today is probably the better choice though either way. slrpnk.net looks like it mostly focuses on local communities.
The good thing about mlmym (the software behind old.lemmy.today, old.lemmy.world, and so on) is that it’s entirely usable without JavaScript :)
So as long as there isn’t something like cloudflare in the way that does require JS, it should work fine to use it that way.
Looking at it right now though, @mrmanager@lemmy.today it looks like old.lemmy.today is erroring with 502?
Yeah, I had to take it down overnight and currently experimenting with anubis for it… will be a bit unstable today… :)