English Chess Forum

Back in the olden days, by which I mean anything until a few years ago, there might be about 10 people online at once. Some people, some guests. Maybe a bot or two.

But of late, I start seeing things like this:
In total there are 74 users online :: 11 registered, 1 hidden and 62 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

I also observe a much slower performance on here than used to be in the past, which may be related to this.

I am not having a pop - I sense the same issues are befalling the ECF website collection from time-to-time.

Do we have any idea of what is causing this, and what is going on?

Looks like somebody with a grudge is paying to take us out is my guess - we are blocking a lot of places now I am sad to say.

Our second most popular location is not normally Brazil.

I have heard some forums I frequent put this down to unofficial scraper bots looking for material to feed to AI models. These bots should self-identify, should respect requests to not do this, and should aim not to degrade overall server performance. But it seems they do it anyway.

No this is simply large volumes of requests overloading the small server and is clearly deliberate.

As we approach our 20 year milestone this is becoming rather hard work.

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 26, 2026 5:07 pm

I have heard some forums I frequent put this down to unofficial scraper bots looking for material to feed to AI models.

So it isn't just chess being targeted?

This is not AI or search or crawlers - this is simply excess volume to access a forum or a topic over and over.

But 300 hundred thousand requests from Brazil for example in a single day is clearly not normal.

Alex Holowczak wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 26, 2026 8:14 pm

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 26, 2026 5:07 pm

I have heard some forums I frequent put this down to unofficial scraper bots looking for material to feed to AI models.

So it isn't just chess being targeted?

In short, no. All sorts of sites are getting swarmed by this stuff.

Well, clearly Skynet is in favour of death for humanity by a thousand (trillion?) cuts... (insert tin foil hat emoticon here).

[If you were trying to wean humanity off the internet...]

I have had to take more drastic action so seems calling it out was not the best plan.

For the first time ever since joining this site, I've just had a "security verification" page displayed before being allowed in. Evidently a consequence of the "more drastic action".

If anyone gets a rate limit message then please inform me and let me know what seemed to cause it.