What is wrong with the site? (Please read updated post #1)

XxMCRxBabyxX · 23-01-2016 9:03pm

XxMCRxBabyxX wrote: »

Emails seem to be back as normal for me

I take it back. I don't appear to have received any boards emails today.

_Tombstone_ · 23-01-2016 9:39pm

Caden Broad Fawn wrote: »

Here you go...curiosity satisfied.

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

Site is painfully slow which is not a result of Cloudflare. I use it frequently on sites I develop.

Probably still issues at server level.

Jaysus, thought it'd depend on the site, I wonder will 1 month do....

AbusesToilets · 23-01-2016 9:42pm

itoro wrote: »

see my post #1014

i cant post urls
but for firefox try right clicking the image under trending threads that has the broken image icon and press copy link location. and then paste the copied url into a new tab, where you will be prompted for captcha again and then reload boards.ie and it should work

Tried that, unfortunately I don't even get a broken link icon. Managed to get the site working on Chrome by using your method.

This is how the site displays at the moment.

Patty O Furniture · 23-01-2016 9:58pm

JP Liz V1 wrote: »

I still cant log in on laptop too many failed log in attempts locked account reset password

Same here, got logged out late last nite & got these messages:

Too many login failures. Your account has been locked. Please reset your password to continue.

The CSRF token is invalid. Please try to resubmit the form.

AbusesToilets wrote: »

Is anyone else having issues with how pages are being displayed? Using Firefox and they are white with black text and formatted horribly. Doing my head in.

Just got that briefly before i posted, as the no of msgs with my user name on left white+black, but dissapeared when replying now.

Also do u have trouble with FlashPlayer plugin, as it usually comes up with a dialog box saying:
Unresponsive Script Plugin has stopped working
as it doesn't help when pages aren't loading either

itoro wrote: »

see my post #1014

i cant post urls
but for firefox try right clicking the image under trending threads that has the broken image icon and press copy link location. and then paste the copied url into a new tab, where you will be prompted for captcha again and then reload boards.ie and it should work

Thanks, i'll try that if it comes up again, but hoping it doesn't!

Pintman Paddy Losty · 23-01-2016 10:52pm

Just a point regarding the site going down. People who were serving bans during that time got two days off their sentence. I think they ahould have 2 days added to their bans in the interest of fairness.

cyberwolf77 · 23-01-2016 11:02pm

Pintman Paddy Losty wrote: »

Just a point regarding the site going down. People who were serving bans during that time got two days off their sentence. I think they ahould have 2 days added to their bans in the interest of fairness.

I was just thinking that last night at work

JCX BXC · 24-01-2016 12:32am

I think that would be a little OTT.

token101 · 24-01-2016 1:00am

The search function doesn't work anymore? This is what happens when I search something. The site is also incredibly slow.

Patty O Furniture · 24-01-2016 1:05am

token101 wrote: »

The search function doesn't work anymore? This is what happens when I search something. The site is also incredibly slow.

I couldn't really see the picture, as all i got was a blank page saying 'connecting' unless that was gonna be the picture

:P

Btw: what were the bans for?

Thanks.

KERSPLAT! · 24-01-2016 1:31am

Pintman Paddy Losty wrote: »

Just a point regarding the site going down. People who were serving bans during that time got two days off their sentence. I think they ahould have 2 days added to their bans in the interest of fairness.

cyberwolf77 wrote: »

I was just thinking that last night at work

They were banned from using either a forum or the site and couldn't do either. Their ban was served.

Jaysus, I think there's enough to be done without the addition of going through bans to see if some should be getting extra days.

Both your posts come across as extremely petty.

cyberwolf77 · 24-01-2016 1:34am

KERSPLAT! wrote: »

They were banned from using either a forum or the site and couldn't do either. Their ban was served.

Jaysus, I think there's enough to be done without the addition of going through bans to see if some should be getting extra days.

Both your posts come across as extremely petty.

I was thinking about it along the lines that we were all serving a ban.

Pintman Paddy Losty · 24-01-2016 1:43am

KERSPLAT! wrote: »

They were banned from using either a forum or the site and couldn't do either. Their ban was served.

Jaysus, I think there's enough to be done without the addition of going through bans to see if some should be getting extra days.

Both your posts come across as extremely petty.

In that case I served a two day ban for no crime. If in the unlikely event I am banned in the future I should have two days removed for time already served.

KERSPLAT! · 24-01-2016 1:50am

You weren't banned, you were unable to access the site.

If you get banned from somewhere, fire the mod a PM stating that because you couldn't access the site for 2 days you should get two days off the ban... We'll see how that goes.

c montgomery · 24-01-2016 1:52am

Pintman Paddy Losty wrote: »

Just a point regarding the site going down. People who were serving bans during that time got two days off their sentence. I think they ahould have 2 days added to their bans in the interest of fairness.

I think maybe you should lighten up

Ken. · 24-01-2016 1:57am

Pintman Paddy Losty wrote: »

In that case I served a two day ban for no crime. If in the unlikely event I am banned in the future I should have two days removed for time already served.

I hereby ban you for 2 days from Separation & divorce and After Hours. Due to time served I'll commute your sentence.

So we're all square now.:D

KomradeBishop · 24-01-2016 2:08am

I wonder what the motive behind such a DDoS could be. If Boards is operating behind CloudFlare now, how is the connection now routed? I assume it goes from User->CloudFlare->Boards?

The websites selected for the DDoS are a bit odd, and look to be websites where useful information could be gained by encouraging sites to redirect traffic through a third-party, in a way that a 'Man In the Middle' (MITM) attack could be put in place on the new route.

CloudFlare - despite its so-far-clean (mostly) history - looks to be the perfect way to setup such a situation, as even if CloudFlare is clean, tapping the route to their local data center would yield full coverage of Irish sites redirecting to them; and if they're not clean, they themselves are potentially the perfect MITM.

CloudFlare definitely get targeted in such a way by governments - and we only have their trust to rely upon, that there isn't any undisclosed co-operation between them and governments or even private interests interested in spying:
www.cloudflare.com/transparency

When The Pirate Bay started using CloudFlare, similar concerns about potential spying were raised:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ubb51/psa_resurrected_piratebay_is_questionable_hosted/
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-will-ditch-cloudflare-asks-users-moderate-150203/

The hosting through CloudFlare is only going to be temporary, right? i.e. will be reverted back to normal once the DDoS subsides, with the ability to switch-on CloudFlare again if needed?

For Boards - and all the sites that are getting attacked (they all seem to be ones with potentially valuable user info, that could be gathered from active users through MITM attacks, so I'd consider that notable) - I'd certainly prefer if they stayed away from redirecting traffic, through a third-party known to co-operate with foreign governments requesting wiretaps etc., unless actively under attack.

itoro · 24-01-2016 5:43am

AbusesToilets wrote: »

Tried that, unfortunately I don't even get a broken link icon. Managed to get the site working on Chrome by using your method.

If you use that url that u copied to the clipboard using the chrome method I.e bstatic blah blah ... And open boards.ie in one Firefox tab and the bstatic url in another firefox tab, once u enter captchas in both tabs and reload boards it will work. And maybe bookmark that bstatic url to use until they fix this bug because cloudflare resets after a timeout period or when u close the browser window.

I would post the url myself but boards won't let me.

ED E · 24-01-2016 7:12am

KomradeBishop wrote: »

I wonder what the motive behind such a DDoS could be. If Boards is operating behind CloudFlare now, how is the connection now routed? I assume it goes from User->CloudFlare->Boards?

The websites selected for the DDoS are a bit odd, and look to be websites where useful information could be gained by encouraging sites to redirect traffic through a third-party, in a way that a 'Man In the Middle' (MITM) attack could be put in place on the new route.

CloudFlare - despite its so-far-clean (mostly) history - looks to be the perfect way to setup such a situation, as even if CloudFlare is clean, tapping the route to their local data center would yield full coverage of Irish sites redirecting to them; and if they're not clean, they themselves are potentially the perfect MITM.

CloudFlare definitely get targeted in such a way by governments - and we only have their trust to rely upon, that there isn't any undisclosed co-operation between them and governments or even private interests interested in spying:
www.cloudflare.com/transparency

When The Pirate Bay started using CloudFlare, similar concerns about potential spying were raised:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ubb51/psa_resurrected_piratebay_is_questionable_hosted/
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-will-ditch-cloudflare-asks-users-moderate-150203/

The hosting through CloudFlare is only going to be temporary, right? i.e. will be reverted back to normal once the DDoS subsides, with the ability to switch-on CloudFlare again if needed?

For Boards - and all the sites that are getting attacked (they all seem to be ones with potentially valuable user info, that could be gathered from active users through MITM attacks, so I'd consider that notable) - I'd certainly prefer if they stayed away from redirecting traffic, through a third-party known to co-operate with foreign governments requesting wiretaps etc., unless actively under attack.

Nope.

DNS records take from 30 mins to several hours to change and then propagate nevermind be cleared from client caches. You cant switch cloudflare on and off willy nilly. The idea is you pay them to always act as a "buffer" in front of you and when 80Gbps starts thundering your way it gets filtered out by their big iron before going near boards' datacenter. The concern is this isn't the NYT, protection of this caliber is really expensive but boards were left without any options. Think we may see please for subscriptions soon.

Boards does not use HTTPS so everyone from your ISP to Digiweb Dublin is a man in the middle, dont put anything on boards you wouldnt print and post in your front window.

pickarooney · 24-01-2016 10:51am

I've got something approaching usability on the desktop but with no images, same on touch on my tablet but on my mobile it's just pure, unclickable text. Android browser in both of the latter cases.

Singer · 24-01-2016 10:58am

token101 wrote: »

The search function doesn't work anymore? This is what happens when I search something. The site is also incredibly slow.

The site is frustratingly slow to use, far slow than it was before the move to Cloudflare. I find it really tough to use on a mobile. It was snappy enough before then.

Looking at Chrome's developer tools timing, every single request to www.boards.ie takes over 5 seconds:
2016-01-24%20at%2009.12.png?raw=1

This is trivially recreatable using a simple curl command - no matter what network I use (all of which are close enough to the CF Dublin endpoint being used):
$ time curl -v -o /dev/null --trace-time http://www.boards.ie/
09:19:16.733964 * About to connect() to www.boards.ie port 80 (#0)
...
09:19:21.881082 * Closing connection #0
real 0m5.451s

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/K4Cjx/www.boards.ie has some history on page load times which look accurate enough (i.e. 1-2 seconds, now 5-8 seconds)

...as for fixing this? If Cloudflare is going to be left inline forever, then maybe boards.ie need to chat to them about optimising the setup.

The_Conductor · 24-01-2016 11:05am

pickarooney wrote: »

I've got something approaching usability on the desktop but with no images, same on touch on my tablet but on my mobile it's just pure, unclickable text. Android browser in both of the latter cases.

I have graphics on desktop and touch- however, loadtimes are a minimum of 10 seconds a page- and exceed 20 seconds- if there are graphics of any nature. Even avatars are problematic. Its o/s agnostic- I've tried android, W7, W10 and iOS- all are behaving similarly. If anything- I'd hazard that its taking even longer to load pages this morning than it was last evening. Wonder what work is going to be like tomorrow- its like sludge logging in on Citrix this morning (government VPN).........