::|CONTENTS
- 11-25-24 Infinite Collab Points
- 02-12-25 Web Crawler DDoS
A technical difficulty is when something goes awry with the
BotB website itself, either going down or reverting to a previous state. These circumstances can cause damage to most user generated content on the site, like
XHBs, entries, or posts.
This article attempts to document the more major outrages of the site, every timestamp is in GMT.
11-25-24 Infinite Collab Points
(to be written)
02-12-25 Web Crawler DDoS
Around 6:50 PM, people started reporting 503 service unavailable errors when trying to reach BotB; Half an hour later, Puke starts troubleshooting this outrage. One of the troubleshooting methods was updating the PHP version, but this just displayed a different message:
|## SYSTEM FATAL ERROR ==
?Failed Data Connect
Connection refused
unable to login and/or access informations
please contact the administrator and/or be patient
Eventually, after an hour of trying to fix the issue, Puke contacted support to help him fix the issue. Eventually, the issue was discovered to be 2 disruptive web crawlers named ImagesiftBot and GPTBot; both web scrapers trying to take other people's work without permission. They were both promptly blocked from accessing the site, and all operation returned to normal.
In total, the site was down for 2 hours, and 2 battles
(1)(2) ran while the website was down. Some strange effects occured like
an erroneously added collaborator on an XHB entries or entries being stolen by other people, but these were fixed and were just funny little side effects.
As a result of this attack, Puke
blocked the IPs of multiple info scraping bots and crawlers from accessing the site. This included IPs from ChatGPT and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
