NOTICE: Board slowness and timeouts

[Anne]

Members may be experiencing board slowness and page timeouts. This is due to the board being badly hit by a new search bot which is overloading the server. I've set up a bot exclusion for it which may take a couple of days to kick in, but meanwhile the searchbot is being held up by a sitewide IP ban, so it's stuck on the front page.  Until it starts to conform to the robots.txt limitation we may see these slowdowns, so please be patient whilst we get it sorted.

[KevinH]

Thanks, Anne.

For me, today's GMB browsing has been much better than over the past week. I was beginning to think adware might have slipped past my defences!

[Anne]

Problem should now have gone as the bot is obeying the robots.txt file finally. The log files show the bot at almost 20,000 hits on the board in less than 4 days. No wonder we've been struggling with that extra traffic!