We started seeing heightened loads on the freeCodeCamp.org Discourse on June 21. Our average CPU load started to grow to the point that the entire forum became unresponsive. Our Initial investigation We updated Discourse from the Stable version to the latest Tests-Passed (Beta) version, which is …

I am just going to close the loop here. Discourse are now hosting https://forum.freecodecamp.org/ . The site is ultra snappy, spammer scripts are no longer causing even a blip. We remain somewhat unclear about what issue it had on digital ocean, there may have been a noisy neighbor, the machine may …

This deserves much more attention Thank you so much for sharing! One of my favorite Discourse instances, freeCodeCamp, has slowed to a halt the last two days.

I don’t think that the heavy load main problem caused by spammer. Here is why: [image] ossia: The volume of traffic to freecodecamp.org/forum has not significantly changed according to Google Analytics. Normal discourse usage (without API) can only work with modern browser because it heavi…

[image] ditatompel: If Google Analytics can’t detect user activity, then discourse should not be able to serve its content and features. This ignores the fact that more than half of people in tech communities are running some sort of Ad Block extension, which always block Google Analytics by …

[image] Falco: which always block Google Analytics by default. Including the new macOS. Was nasty rumour only. See below .

Is akismet enabled? Can you turn on moderation for trust level 1?

[image] ditatompel: Did you see high queue jobs on sidekiq process? Yes, we did see the jobs kicking up and down as a part of my initial investigation. We then proceeded to revoke all of the user keys. It does not seem have had done any change on the stability though. Although we are workin…

I don’t see why it’s strange if there can be requests without js based analytics showing anything. The spammer can use the same endpoints as the javascript does, without javascript. No javascript based analytics would trigger

This is far more likely to be a plug-in interaction or bad proxying config. We see zero success from “spammers” on our hosting. Given it is a coding site it could also be “coders” trying to do something weird on the forum as well? But no — spammers aren’t a generalized problem across the thousands…

Yes, I am inclined its either config (bad plugin or proxing setup) or someone messing with forum. The later is more probable cause from all the patterns. From what I have noticed is that the spam accounts have been created over a long period of time and there are trying to add links (to gain backl…

[image] 42.5% steal is really high, even if you’re the one that is causing the issues on that hypervisor. This looks like a noisy neighbour to me. If I were you I would contact DO and ask them to move the droplet to another hypervisor.

freeCodeCamp.org Discourse is Collapsing from Spammer Scripts

Support Self-hosting

merefield (Robert) June 24, 2020, 11:21am 5

~~Including the new macOS.~~

Was nasty rumour only. See below.

Topic		Replies	Views
Anonymous views suddenly very high Data & reporting	48	1860	December 10, 2025
Discourse overloaded real traffic or DDOS? 100% CPU usage despite of decent traffic and high specs server Self-hosting server-resources	18	2547	September 25, 2021
Questions about moving an existing forum to Discourse Community Building	21	3189	December 26, 2018
Discourse & Cloudflare Self-hosting	48	5663	January 26, 2024
Diagnosing spam attack of 100 topics Feature	34	3128	May 29, 2017

freeCodeCamp.org Discourse is Collapsing from Spammer Scripts

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