ECF rating website - Connection timed out

[Neill Cooper]

Is anyone else having problems with accessing the ECF rating website, and the ECF LMS?

[Paul Cooksey]

same for me

[Neill Cooper]

Both now working again!

[IM Jack Rudd]

I was having trouble with the entire ECF site. I put it down to my being in Singapore.

[John Upham]

I put it down to my being in Singapore.

Your going to Singapore brought down the ECF rating database?

[Neill Cooper]

Gone again:
Connection timed out Error code 522
Visit cloudflare.com for more information.
2026-03-24 11:59:03 UTC

[Carl Hibbard]

Gone again:
Connection timed out Error code 522
Visit cloudflare.com for more information.
2026-03-24 11:59:03 UTC

Here or at ECF?

[Neill Cooper]

ECF

[Carl Hibbard]

ECF

They may need to block certain ASN's as I am doing now due to abuse in order to get better performance.

[Steve Emmerton]

It's a problem that the ECF are aware of. As of this morning everything appears to be working ok again.

[Malcolm Peacock]

It happened again today. The server was hit by a large volume of requests. Sometimes its search engines crawling, sometimes is data collection for machine learning and sometimes it is hackers. Mostly it was the LMS that was being hit. Apparently they put cloud flair into attack mode temporarily ( it asks you to say you are human ) , and will be blocking one source of attack. Running any web site is a pain these days. It didn't look lack hacking this time - just crawling ( I use robots.txt to ask crawlers to avoid most of the site, but they don't always do it)

[Carl Hibbard]

If the ECF want assistance on this one just drop me an email.

[John Upham]

It happened again today. The server was hit by a large volume of requests. Sometimes its search engines crawling, sometimes is data collection for machine learning and sometimes it is hackers. Mostly it was the LMS that was being hit. Apparently they put cloud flair into attack mode temporarily ( it asks you to say you are human ) , and will be blocking one source of attack. Running any web site is a pain these days. It didn't look lack hacking this time - just crawling ( I use robots.txt to ask crawlers to avoid most of the site, but they don't always do it)

You might wish to take action with the firewall configuration but I assume that the ECF is not permitted to manage its own servers firewalls.

[Carl Hibbard]

It is mainly volume abuse - we got 25 million requests last month which is excessive for a chess forum.

[John Upham]

It is mainly volume abuse - we got 25 million requests last month which is excessive for a chess forum.

I used to get this on the BCN web site and was able to tune the WordPress Pro firewall to block certain domains. China provided much of the traffic to be blocked.