Unannounced forum outage 25-10-02

[Moonchild]

There was an unannounced forum outage 2025-10-02 starting midnight UTC and lasting approximately 10 hours.
This was related to another recent bout of abusive traffic (this time from hosts belonging to LeaseKVM and HostPapa in the USA). This traffic has been mitigated and we're back online without damage (except maybe some frustration of our users ).
Sorry if this caused inconvenience.

[adoxa]

"Unread posts" is still not working for me ("Not public").

[Moonchild]

Clear your cache.
It should work just fine (and the "not public" page should have been served with a short TTL so unless you cache aggressively it should not remain anyway)

[adoxa]

A simple refresh worked.

[UCyborg]

Why I suddenly can't open the forum on any Chromium I have around?

[Moonchild]

Are you using a recent version of Chromium?

[UCyborg]

WebView 126.0.6478.71 on the phone and Edge 120.0.2210.91 on PC.

[UCyborg]

Faking another user agent fixes it...

Wasn't Moonchild the one preaching against user agent sniffing? I can get in with eg. "Mozilla/5.0", but not real one.

[Moonchild]

Edge 120.0.2210.91

you're 20 versions behind on that one. Update if you want to use edge.
As for webview... not really sure if there's an easy way to adjust the stuff I had to put in place.

Wasn't Moonchild the one preaching against user agent sniffing? I can get in with eg. "Mozilla/5.0", but not real one.

Absolutely, but one of the very common things with DoS scripting is that they use old chrome UAs. Matching old versions that nobody should still be running cut a lot of abusive traffic. So despite me not liking it for feature detection, it's sometimes necessary to kill bots before they hit the back-end of sites and cause load.
It's either that or install anubis for the forum as well, which I'd rather not do right now.

[UCyborg]

Fine, I'll set my user agent to Chrome 9999.99.9999.999.

On a serious note, I hate updating Google's crap and only do it when it becomes unusable. I use Via on Android and that does support per-site user agents.

[biopsin]

Hi Moonchild,

after the outage I can no longer connect to the forum. I get a message in the browser.

Code: Select all

net::ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR

Android 11 (Lineageos-18.1), webview 138 (AOSmimum system webview)

Code: Select all

 ~ $ curl --head --http2 https://forum.palemoon.org
HTTP/2 200
server: nginx
date: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:53:17 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
vary: Accept-Encoding
set-cookie: PMF0725_u=1; expires=Sun, 04-Jan-2026 11:53:17 GMT; path=/; domain=forum.palemoon.org; secure; HttpOnly
set-cookie: PMF0725_k=; expires=Sun, 04-Jan-2026 11:53:17 GMT; path=/; domain=forum.palemoon.org; secure; HttpOnly
set-cookie: PMF0725_sid=64ed72ca44b6be891f7f90b88e12ed88; expires=Sun, 04-Jan-2026 11:53:17 GMT; path=/; domain=forum.palemoon.org; secure; HttpOnly
cache-control: private, no-cache="set-cookie"
expires: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:53:17 GMT
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
strict-transport-security: max-age=33530000;
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-xss-protection: 1
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin

[Moonchild]

I've made some adjustments which should allow sufficiently recent android webview. Please let me know if this works (because regex negation is tricky)

[biopsin]

It did, thank you.

[UCyborg]

Huh, works for my two cases as well without workarounds.

Off-topic:
Google is still good at blocking older versions of Android Auto. Not that I really need it, but eg. managing audio player should require zero online connectivity. Or updates. I'm allergic to software that just stops working for no good reason.