We have done a lot of changes to the system and the site should be much more responsive now.
It is getting continuously hit by various bots (Hetzner in Germany seems to be a popular site) and they run queries which are accidentally or intentionally generating high CPU activity. This cannot be eliminated on a publicly accessible site but we have done a lot of work to minimise the effect of these.
A lot of work has been done on the server, to deal with the increasing attacks, scraping and general bot activity, and to make it more responsive.
In addition to several 3rd World countries, a huge number of IP ranges has been firewalled.
If you get a message (possibly from Cloudflare) saying that your connection is being rate limited, please drop me a line.
Some people may also see a captcha here and there. This is not on the main forum, but on obvious abuse targets like the AIP button on the airports.euroga.org site. This is as intended. It should be only a simple tick, not one of these
Thanks for all the work you are doing! Highly appreciated.
This morning one of the regulars here got blocked… Need to find out what did that. But I can’t contact him because he thinks he has been banned!
Hopefully the blocked user has been sorted. He happened to be in a subnet which was hosting sizeable attacks on our server at one stage.
If anybody gets a problem, please contact me on
If you get a “rate limit” please also contact me also; the figure is being tweaked to catch people who set up bots which hit our server at a frequency below the “DOS attack” blocked by Cloudflare, but still enough to cause a lot of load.
This is quite funny. The bot realised his IP got blocked after 500 hits, so:
Now, we are blocking entire server farms. These should be ISPs so should not affect anyone browsing EuroGA – unless they are on a VPN terminating on a server farm but very few are likely to be doing that.
This was one attack yesterday
from a well known spammer farm startdedicated.de. You can see how the load dropped right off at the end. That attack was adaptively structured to bring the server down, quite simply.
Peter wrote:
That attack was adaptively structured to bring the server down, quite simply.
I don’t see why people bother with this. It’s not like EuroGA is a critical infrastructure that some governments would be interested in targeting.
Naïve question: do you know why this happens? Is it to create a blackmail situation, or just malicious opportunism (I can do it so I will)?
In my imagination it’s a cartel of banned posters huddled around a laptop in a café next to the Kremlin
Edit: crossed with Airborne Again
I will send you a PM since I don’t want to open a can of old worms here. It is prob99 done by particular people.
In the end anybody can do this but few will put in the effort to do it effectively. We are behind Cloudflare which blocks “proper” DOS attacks. CF, even in its free version, also allows many other blocks to be set up, which is really handy. You can block up to 10,000 IP ranges. We have already blocked Russia China India and some others and these are huge e.g. blocking Russia and China is something like 20,000 IP ranges alone.
Recently I keep getting “Server under heavy load” messages and am told to come back later. Usually clears within a minute. Possible DOS attacks?
