[2025-10-27] Site performance issues

An error occurred: Site is under extreme load, search is disabled, try again later

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I normally search through Google as follows:

Dimensions Convoy S2+ site:budgetlightforum.com

Wonder why the site is so busy :thinking:

Other forums I frequent have stats on the bottom along the lines of Users online: XXXX Most online ever: YYYY, I think only total registered users is displayed for this forum.

After seeing this post I tried two quick searches on a mobile device while not logged in and I got " no results" no other information.

Tried again just before I logged in now and it is working.

Hi everyone, my apologies for the inconvenience if you’re experiencing performance issues with the site today. There is some kind of crawler/bot that was slamming the site with requests, so I temporarily put the site in a mode that requires logging in to view pages. I’ll post updates here after a better resolution is put in place.

Thanks for your patience!

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I know it’s not perfect, but the temporary fix seems to be working great! (for those with BLF accounts) :grin:

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Oh and here I thought it was my garbage internet being broken once again. Hope you’ll get it sorted soon, this sounds like an annoying issue to take care of…

Performance seems to be back to normal now.

Probably some dork training a LLM on the contents of this forum…

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My thoughts exactly…
And by “dork” I think we’re referring to the likes of OpenAI / ChatGPT. They’re not the source of this particular server thrashing, but their crawler is the #1 in requests over the past 24 hours. :-/

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It’s only IP and privacy infringement if you’re doing it slowly, once you’re doing it at an industrial scale it turns into “training” and earns you billions :slight_smile:

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As much as I enjoy using online LLMs (such as ChatGPT), they do have a “dark side”. :man_supervillain:

This thread might be relevant…

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I’m guessing this has changed?
I was able to access a BLF thread without logging in.
(I did a test with another browser.)

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It should be as illegal as picking someone’s lock without their express permission. TOS and other service agreements be damned.

**civilian installations and sites should be off limits for training, imho.

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Yep, the range of IP addresses that were making excessive requests were blocked and anonymous browsing was re-enabled. And now the server thrashing from that source seems to have desisted.

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