Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Hi all, submitting a bug report to myself as I just hit some intermittent 'Service Unavailable' error pages while clicking around. Checked on some server metrics and there we're randomly hitting some resource limits that are causing this.

I've got a support ticket open with the hosting people to try and get it sorted out - but in the meantime just wanted to let you all know in case you run into this too. It seems to be intermittent so if you hit it, a refresh after a few seconds might do the trick -- but definitely a good time to use some classic tricks like copying any long posts before you hit 'post' on em in case you get unlucky with one of these.

If anyone hits this a lot, please let me know either here (if you can reach this thread to post..) or on discord, or email the admins at admins [at] lotrfanaticsplaza [dot] com.

[edit: ominous post count milestone for this thread, woops]

For what it is worth, I have had this a lot just now (time of posting) and had it the same time yesterday, but not at all in the intervening period.

PS. That is indeed an ominous post count. If you reply to this post then you break free.

Thanks - we just had another bout of traffic and I've added some configurations that might help us out. In short, there are a handful of IP addresses that started periodically hammering the site this week, and I've blocked them. They appear to have been web scraper type bots rather than some kind of targeted attack, but in any case we'll see if the problem recurs with any other IP's or if it's taken care of.

If it recurs, you might see the errors again, or you might see a page like this:



That page is an extra safeguard that seemed to do a good job of blocking the bad requests during this most recent round of traffic (once I enabled it), so if the issue recurs I may need to temporarily re-enable it. If you hit this, please just click the check box and you should be automatically redirected to the site. Unless you're a bot, which case please don't click it and go leave us alone.