InsaneJournal Announcements

More Bots Issues

squeaky

4/23/25 09:06 pm

We've been seeing a massive uptick in bot requests lately, leading to an outage that happened today. We have implemented some new rules at the edge of the network to attempt to mitigate the issue.

Please let us know if you start seeing excessive new errors as part of this is attempting to limit connections from non end user sources. We need to be sure we aren't causing undue complications in efforts to keep the site available.

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• everly

  4/30/25 02:55 pm (UTC)

  

  the site is very slow, not posting comments, and not loading pages correctly

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  • squeaky

    4/30/25 04:15 pm (UTC)

    

    If you are on a VPN we are taking actions against anonymous IPs to reduce excess toil on the site. If that is the case, try accessing without a VPN

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• Issue connecting from Dreamhost

  scalderwood

  4/30/25 03:15 pm (UTC)

  Hi, Squeaky,
  
  My API calls to the flat interface seem to be being blocked by AWS' WAF. This call from my local machine returns a good response:
  curl -X POST 'https://www.insanejournal.com/interface/flat' -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -d 'mode=getchallenge'
  
  But that same call from my web server (hosted by Dreamhost) results in a CAPTCHA challenge from AWS' WAF (indicated by a response header `x-amzn-waf-action` with a value of `challenge`).
  
  My site is journalwatcher.com. The current IPs look to be
  173.236.255.16
  173.236.254.75
  
  Thanks for your help!

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  • Re: Issue connecting from Dreamhost

    squeaky

    4/30/25 03:39 pm (UTC)

    

    If you didn't already, please open a support request and we'll get it resolved there.

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    • Re: Issue connecting from Dreamhost

      scalderwood

      4/30/25 03:47 pm (UTC)

      Thank you!

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• Semi-related question

  kimity

  5/3/25 08:03 pm (UTC)

  

  I know someone working toward a cyber security degree. He needs to do a check on a company for their cyber security to complete it, would you be willing to let him do that for the site? It'd be super helpful to both of you.
  
  Appreciated,
  Kimity

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• mostinquisitive

  5/4/25 03:07 pm (UTC)

  i keep getting "Max challenge attempts exceeded. Please refresh the page to try again!" and i'm not on a vpn but ij is unusable with the new rules implemented

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