Hongfire offline?

[Capt Jam]

Can't access it again...

 

[Redorc]

Yep, maybe a crash, maybe an attack, maybe both...

 

[gekigami]

Eh, it was back up by the time I had decided to say something about it

 

[Ram-0-Ram]

Eh, it was back up by the time I had decided to say something about it

Happens to me today as well. When it was back to normal and I post something it become problematic again. I left with no posts at all....

 

[gekigami]

It's back down again?

 

[Ram-0-Ram]

It's back down again?

Welcome to the club of "downtime"

 

[gekigami]

... Well, I don't know if this relates in any way, but it's back up now, I think (?)

Edit: Well, it's acting like it's down, but it just seems to be greatly overloaded. I'm able to get on if I request the page a few times.

Not too surprising though, I mean, HS just came out, as far as I know, right?

 

[Ram-0-Ram]

... Well, I don't know if this relates in any way, but it's back up now, I think (?)

Edit: Well, it's acting like it's down, but it just seems to be greatly overloaded. I'm able to get on if I request the page a few times.

Not too surprising though, I mean, HS just came out, as far as I know, right?

But I am pretty much convinced that downtime didn't happen on SBPR release...

Edit:

Let's wait when all the lurkers go away in HF after they get the uncensored or translation or read any post that has some solution to their problems like how to install or translation or some game-play

 

[gekigami]

... That's pretty true, and I do believe people were hyped for SBPR... Hm...

This is incredibly terrible timing for downtime


Edit: Aaaaand it`s back up again, whooo!

P.S.S. ... Nevermind, was only able to access pages for a minute or two. This is really starting to grind my gears


P.s.s.s. Whoa, the site's being updated. Nevermind the waiting, seems to be justified

P.s.s.s.s. Or is it..? It turned back to its usual design now. Messages were on the top left with some weird black dots around the "0 messages" icon. Looked weird, and happened after trying to reach the side and getting an off-yellow white background color...?

 

[effoff]

Yep, It's up & Down like a prostitute's underwear :)

 

[Capt Jam]

Yep, It's up & Down like a prostitute's underwear :)

...Mmmm... The why do I fell like I'm the one who get f_ck!!

P.S. Hi ramoram!

 

[Aastaroth]

Hmmm... looks like the server keeps overloaded from time to time. Perhaps it is being DDOS-ed? I wonder.

 

[gekigami]

Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking. Think we should tell HF to put DDOS protection? I.E. A page that appears the first time your IP is seen that stays for 5 seconds before letting you in, perhaps hosted on its own server to handle shite like a teddy bear in Earthbound?

I saw a few sites do that. I think Gogoanime or Kissanime were one of them.

Never seen those two go down

 

[Aastaroth]

This would be some good suggestions; or perhaps HongFire himself is working on this already.
In any case we have to reach HF first, unless HongFire is also visiting here

What a pity that HF gets suffered once again, when we didn't even fully recovered from the last attack.

 

[Sinbad]

Hongfire was being a bit slow before HS released. It would take several seconds for a page to load. I thought it might be DDOS protection, but apparently not.
All I get is a time-out when attempting to load.

 

[tmvaegis]

There's a pretty easy reason for why HF is suffering:

Honey-Select's release.

I was online just before it was made available to download, during, and after. It's no coincidence that it started having server issues right when it was made available by girlcelly, and thus, the lurkers and whoever came streaming in by thousands. The current version of the forum simply cannot handle this large jump in visitor activity.

 

[gekigami]

Why would HF have gone through a server downgrade though? I was pretty sure he upgraded the server's RAM not long ago, and there hadn't been issues like this when SBPR released,
as Ramoram mentioned

 

[Aastaroth]

There's a pretty easy reason for why HF is suffering:

Honey-Select's release.

I was online just before it was made available to download, during, and after. It's no coincidence that it started having server issues right when it was made available by girlcelly, and thus, the lurkers and whoever came streaming in by thousands. The current version of the forum simply cannot handle this large jump in visitor activity.

Hi tmv! Long time no see. While DDOS is just my wild guess, your reason also makes sense to me.
Perhaps the updated forum software just sucked at handling high traffics. We will have to wait for HongFire to confirm this.
If so, maybe we will have to wait a week or so? Do we need to camp here again?


Edit:
@GeekyGami

I have followed the HS game thread here and someone also mentioned that the updated forum software (something from v3 to v5) isn't good at handling high traffics.
I am no expert on this so I cannot justify the opinion, but if this is true, then it explains the whole story.
When SBPR released we were still using the old forum software. It is the first time we get a high profile game released after the last forum update.

 

[gekigami]

That would make complete sense, then. Would suggesting a traffic wall still be a plausible idea? Say, you have to log in to not wait 5 seconds before accessing the site,

when we include the value that the wall could be hosted on another server, so that it could handle its data without causing issues with the regular forum

 

[tmvaegis]

Hey, Aastaroth! Haven't seen you around lately on HF, actually. Good to see you! :) I don't know how DDOS works, so I'll just take your word for it. Yup, I was eagerly awaiting on the Pre-Release thread when SBPR was being released, and the activity was WAY above normal. What I'm curious about is just how many legitimate members there are in HF, now. Bond Travolta mentioned Spambots as a possibility, so I think there really needs to be a better way of confirming membership and blocking out unwarranted visitors. I honestly wish HF wasn't using the vBulletin 5+, but oh well.

Btw, right now, there are 1357 users online: 127 members and 1230 guests. Doesn't seem right, does it?

All-in-All, it's kinda pathetic, and a big pain in the ass for us members. Yeah, HF upgraded the servers RAM a month or two ago, so clearly that's not the issue. I still blame the software's incapability of handling the high-traffic. Is it possible to downgrade to a more stable version?

 

[gekigami]

Unfortunately the stable version in question was the reason for the upgrade. Turns out it had loopholes, which were apparently fixed in later iterations.
Loopholes were taken advantage of, action had to be taken

 

[Erik1986]

Another thing i noticed while looking through HF forum is the sheer abundance of spam topics being made. i saw an entire page in one general discusions tab i think with nothing but spam topics all posted in short order after each other by either manny dummy accounts, or one same account several times. I think the combined influx of legit users copled with these spam bots are making HF forum just slow to respond.

 

[Redorc]

New forum version is probably more heavy on the servers, and probably less optimized for hongfire usage, also, there are still bugs to squash, not to speak about the new horrible way to follow subscribed threads ...
If there was some kind of ddos, then there's nothing that can be done, apart from using a CDN with ddos protection.

 

[gekigami]

The way to follow subscribed threads would be fine if it wasn't borked

I mean, if it could properly lead you to the page that contains the newest post/comment, and lead you to that comment just fine, I'd be pretty happy with it.
It'd actually complement the added commenting system pretty well.

Thing is, right now it leads you to first page, top, or like, page 27 for SBPR characters, not going any further, making getting to the end of it a hassle.


Wonder how HF's going to deal with these issues. I mean, the amount of issues that happened since the hacker attack is kind of a clusterfuck when you think about it

 

[Dr Yoshi]

I may be mistaken, but I don't think that Hongfire is currently targeted by a DDOS attack.

If it's an attack, it's a small-scale one : during the past few days, the number of guest connections to the forum as been around 1,000~1,500 concurrent users. That would represent a rather small botnet, and any properly-set fail2ban/nftables filtering should be enough to deflect such attack.

Checking the site at regular intervals can give you a good grasp at what's going on : the software suffers massive slowdowns when there's more than 1,000 concurrent visitors, then begins to choke heavily when reaching about 1,300 users, leading in dropped connections (missing CSS, missing images) and simply won't respond to new connections anymore when numbers get higher than 1,500 people visiting the site.

Those are some really low volumes. In the meantime, Anime-Sharing has been serving pages to an average 10,000 users during the whole weekend without any stutter.

The culprit is known : it's vBulletin 5. This forum software is a horrid mess, with bad design and bad code. Hard to use and slow. This is what I wrote about it 3 months ago :

I may sound pessimistic, but I don't believe Hongfire is ever going to recover from this.

Switching to vBulletin 5.x was a very bad move. This update is notorious for being a poorly-written clusterfuck ridden with bugs and performance discrepancies, and the Interwebz are full of horror stories concerning communities that were severely impacted —and even died— from the upgrade.

---

So, here we are. A new game from Illusion just came out. And out of habit, lurkers are visiting Hongfire to try to find and download the good ol' HF Patch or at least get some mods to have it translated and uncensored.

Now, the biggest issue is that this situation may last.

Modders want to access the site to upload their works. Players want to access the site to get their translations and uncensors. They won't suddenly disappear nor change their mind : they will simply force-refresh the board until it displays something (which is nothing, actually) then check the site again a couple hours later for new content, like they always did.

And thus, a wild paradox appears : in order to access Hongfire, we need to wait until people don't want to access Hongfire any more. And when that time will come, would you still want to access it ? Would you still want to upload your mods knowing that their audience is never going to be what it should be, since they'll become unavailable as soon as there's a bit of traffic ?

Personally, as the French guy I am, I think I'll simply go on strike. I won't post on Hongfire any more as long as it's in its current state.