Change to Forum Software?

[virtualmike]

Recently, the forum seems to forget who I am every few days and I have to log in again, even though I've checked "Remember me" on the main screen, next to the login boxes.

I haven't logged the specific days when this has occurred, but I can state that today was one of them.

In case it's of any significance, I view the forum using Firefox (latest version), in a container that isolates Sonic cookies from other containers (and vice versa). This container is set to retain indefinitely any cookies set by *.sonic.net. According to the Firefox inspector, only forums.sonic.net cookies are being set by the host. The ones currently there expire in a year.

Is anyone else having this challenge? Has something changed in the forum software? ...thanks!

[loherj]

Thank you for reaching out about this. I'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I also encountered the same issue you explained while using Chrome around when you posted this.

Upon opening the forums and being "logged out," I logged back in and then manually logged out. Then I logged back in and chose "remember me again," and I was logged in upon re-opening the forums as of yesterday and now today.

Can you let me know if this is still ongoing for you? If so, I will open a thread with our System Operations team for investigation.

Thanks!

[conradpino]

@loherj I had same experience when first reading @virtualmike post but after doing pretty much what you did, automatic login operation resumed pretty much trouble free since. Many thanks!

[virtualmike]

Thanks, Jacob and Conrad. At least it's not just me!

The first occurrence was late last week--maybe Thursday or Friday. I signed in, with "Remember Me" checked, and things were fine until Monday, when again, I had to login. I did not logout and back in either time.

Since I logged back in on Monday, I haven't seen any issues, but I'll follow-up in this discussion if I do. ...thanks!

[joemuller]

Hi All,

A quick update on issues with our Forums. Starting around March 17th, the Operations Team started noticing what appeared to be a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on our forums. After several late-night and early-morning attempts to block the large ranges of Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers which were sourcing the traffic, we found that these were automated Bots/Scrapers, likely for some sort of Large Language Model (LLM) project, following every link they could on each forum page. As you can imagine, that's a lot of clickable links to follow, and since they were coming from hundreds to thousands of different IP addresses, that created a large number of 'guest' sessions for our servers to try and keep track of.

As a temporary measure, we set up a script to expire guest sessions every hour - an earlier version of this script accidentally was expiring sessions/logins for everyone instead of just the bots, so that's why you were getting logged out.

At this time, we're working on active measures to block and filter out badly-behaved bots which are causing instability and poor performance on our Forums. We've fixed up any other temporary measures so the logout/disconnect problem is no longer an issue.

As an aside, this mass plague of poorly-behaved Bots/Crawlers is continuing to impact many other companies and Open Source software projects right now.

-- Joe M

[virtualmike]

Oh, the joys of administering servers.

Thanks for providing the background, Joe! ...cheers!

[conradpino]

@joemuller many thanks here as well.

[virtualmike]

It's not just Sonic struggling with this...

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/02/ai-cr ... -surge-50/

[virtualmike]

Is the forum still working? I haven't seen any new posts since Thursday, April 3.Everything ok in Santa Rosa?

[loherj]

Is the forum still working? I haven't seen any new posts since Thursday, April 3.Everything ok in Santa Rosa?

I haven't heard of any issues with the forums, but everything appears to be working as intended. I think there may just be a lull in posts.