AW painfully slow.

Late last year, AW got hit with a DDoS attack. The slowness you're seeing is an artifact of the protections that have been put in place.

It's variable, but it's going to be slow because every transaction is checked.

We are, frankly, still being attacked.

We will be moving to a new server and software in the near future, which will help, but right now it's going to be slow when there are a lot of bots attempting to log in, post, etc.

My GOD someone must be expending a lot of time, effort, and cold hard cash on perpetuating something that barely registers as an annoyance for us users (but must be aggravating as anything for our benevolent hosts. Seriously, thanks for everything you do, AW Admin!) Imagine if you took that kind of wherewithal and turned it towards, say, shutting down literary scam sites, or IP thieves, or something else.

Albedo said:

My GOD someone must be expending a lot of time, effort, and cold hard cash on perpetuating something that barely registers as an annoyance for us users (but must be aggravating as anything for our benevolent hosts. Seriously, thanks for everything you do, AW Admin!) Imagine if you took that kind of wherewithal and turned it towards, say, shutting down literary scam sites, or IP thieves, or something else.

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QFT. I had no idea we were still being attacked. It runs slow sometimes, but overall I wouldn't say it's that bad, especially if this is an ongoing problem. Jeez, some people.

To clarify, my comment about "some people" was the people with nothing better to do than attack a writing forum, not about you. I think it's reasonable to wonder what's going on after you've tried everything else to speed things up.

Albedo said:

My GOD someone must be expending a lot of time, effort, and cold hard cash on perpetuating something that barely registers as an annoyance for us users (but must be aggravating as anything for our benevolent hosts. Seriously, thanks for everything you do, AW Admin!) Imagine if you took that kind of wherewithal and turned it towards, say, shutting down literary scam sites, or IP thieves, or something else.

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That is, in fact, the motivation behind the DDOS attacks. And yes, we involved law enforcement.

shortstorymachinist said:

QFT. I had no idea we were still being attacked. It runs slow sometimes, but overall I wouldn't say it's that bad, especially if this is an ongoing problem. Jeez, some people.

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I am at this point spending an inordinate amount of time and energy keeping the site online.

Part of the problem is that DDOS attacks are driven by bots, and bot nets of infected computers. Once you unleash it, it's pretty hard to put a bot net back in the box.

We have the license for the new software. We will need to pay someone to do heavy lifting moving the database to the new software.

AW Admin said:

We have the license for the new software. We will need to pay someone to do heavy lifting moving the database to the new software.

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Thanks for all that you do. I’d like to send $$$ to help. Should I use the usual donation link?

Introversion said:

Thanks for all that you do. I’d like to send $$$ to help. Should I use the usual donation link?

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Yes, please; that's the link to use if you're able to contribute.

Introversion said:

Thanks for all that you do. I’d like to send $$$ to help. Should I use the usual donation link?

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If you're able to do that, it would be appreciated.

There's a memo field; please note that it's for the server move, if you want. Alternatively you can PM Mac to tell her.

Done. I don't know the magnitude of the costs AW bears for this, but hopefully my pennies help.

I ran maintenance checks and did some blocking of large groups of IPs.

It may help for a while, but they'll be baccckkkk.

And it seems they are back. Minutes pass as I try to go from one forum to another. I cannot connect to AW at all through the email links. Sorry this has happened, it makes the site unusable, and I miss it.

AW is very slow on my PC and laptop, but for whatever reason I can rarely get it to load at all on my phone anymore. I tried disabling my content blocker to see if that was the issue, but. No dice.

I'm glad the site's still accessible at all though. Wishing admin best of luck dealing with these ongoing DDoS attacks.

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AW is very slow on my PC and laptop, but for whatever reason I can rarely get it to load at all on my phone anymore. I tried disabling my content blocker to see if that was the issue, but. No dice.

I'm glad the site's still accessible at all though. Wishing admin best of luck dealing with these ongoing DDoS attacks.

e. Also sometimes the site hangs after I click Post and creates strange duplicates like just happened here.

Site is loading really slowly for me, too. :-(

I'm so sorry you guys have to deal with this, but I'm very grateful you are doing what it takes to keep the site online.

I just can't fathom the nastiness of the people who commissioned and engineered this attack.

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I'm so sorry you guys have to deal with this, but I'm very grateful you are doing what it takes to keep the site online.

I just can't fathom the nastiness of the people who commissioned and engineered this attack.

There's no guys; it's just me.

Basically I'm just trying to keep things running until we move to the new server.

There's not a lot I can do. If you think it's slow for you, imagine what it's like for me trying to do standard maintenance and admin.