MES Forum Offline

[s130]

Some of you may have noticed that the MES Website Forum is offline - no page 404

As moderator of this MES forum I contacted MES and was informed:

I stopped it. There was an attack with excessive number of requests which resulted in constant 100% load of the server. I’m still thinking how to block the attacks.

MES Forum has been a heavily spammed and abused site. Since June 2024 I've had to ban over 375 users and many many IP addresses used by different user ids trying to bypass user id bans. Never ending pain in the exhaust pipe!

 

[ben]

I imagine that's all the new AI crawlers that are causing mischief everywhere.

We have thousands of them online here now at a time (peaked at 16,000!) but luckily have the server power to deal with it.

I did have to start blocking certain data centers though, cloudflare is very useful for this.

 

[s130]

Hi Ben.

I have mentioned to MES that the likes of Cloudflare and other hostings have the technology and capacity to ward off these types of attacks etc. No doubt MES will be looking at these but all these higher/better hostings etc. come at increased cost.

Fiat Forum has, from what I can establish, a massive audience and I think some advertising revenue to bank on. From what I can see/experience MES has been just MES with no other advertising etc. revenues other than it's MES sales.

As an interesting side issue since MES and AlfaOBD came into existence as affordable products the likes of MaxiECU and Foxwell products have really lowered the cost for decent diagnostics.

I have MES, MaxiECU and Foxwell products and each have their uses. Foxwell NT301 for "Always On Board Daily" get you home diagnostics etc. MES and MaxiECU for more capable at home and when travelling diagnostics.

Sadly all of these solutions will in the next couple of years no longer be available to us without expensive manufacturer subscription accounts. Worse still even today to get access to these services one has to be a VAT registered automotive business.

Back to Horse & Cart me thinks.

 

[ben]

have mentioned to MES that the likes of Cloudflare and other hostings have the technology and capacity to ward off these types of attacks etc. No doubt MES will be looking at these but all these higher/better hostings etc. come at increased cost.

I use the Cloudflare free plan, it covers everything needed to keep the trouble traffic out