I have experienced a series of 500 and 404 errors over the last 24 hours or so.

As mentioned on the front page - some idiot is flooding the site.

Not much can be done as it is all coming from overseas. I am experimenting a bit to help mitigate it but cannot make any guarantees at this time. Unfortunately, there's just people that want to cause trouble for others and they do it without provocation. When they get bored, they'll probably stop.

Flooding really! Why and how. Yeah some people have no life hey.

Einstein predicted that we would create a generation of Morons and I believe we are succeeding. There are a lot out there doing nothing but texting & Clubs are falling apart because there are none prepared to join nor take up executive positions.

Plenty out there with an IQ comparable to a house brick.

Marc, quite true and Extinction Rebellion comes to my mind when such words are spoken. All duxes of the local looney bin, that lot.

Talking about Extension Rebellion, the peaceful peaceloving demonstrators, a mate who's a member of the Public Safety Response Team (PSRT) aka the riot squad, some might remember seeing on the news, a guy dressed as a Koala whacking a cop ( my mate ) on the head with a tree branch causing quite a bruise and headache for days, after his arrest he was searched and lo and behold he had a box cutter in his pocket.

Watch the movie Idiocracy. It's set in the future and the premise is that only the stupid people breed. It's supposed to be a comedy but it's becoming scarily true!!!

The police should move in like The Met did on all the poll tax protestors in England back in the 1980s - just draw their batons and beat the bejesus out of them. Once these fools glue themselves to the road, they should automatically cop a whole array of charges: resist arrest, breach of the peace, obstruct motor traffic, fail to comply with an official direction - the whole box and dice.

It never ceases to amaze me what idiots will do to disrupt various forums. This forum would hardly be a controversial site and makes me wonder even the more.

As for so called Extinction Rebellion ditto on past comments, those idiot protesters need to go out and get a life somewhere.

Edit: noticed wireless internet around here is rather slow at times. All the bored school kids at home playing with their on line game toys !

I think some of you have experienced images not loading properly since I put some roadblocks up for the flooder. Originally I assumed this was because of the lost bandwidth but then it occurred to me that the bandwidth shouldn't be an issue now that the firewall is doing its job.

It turns out that the firewall may have been doing it's job too well so I have backed it off just a little and images should now load for everyone.

Please let me know if image loading is still an issue and I'll tweak again.

Some people are just messed up. Unfortunately there are some limitations on what can be done to stop certain types of attacks. This forum software pretty much stops spam robots in their tracks - almost all of them and this function requires no input from me on an ongoing basis. As we've seen, once every six months or so, one or two will sneak through but that amount is easy to deal with. If the anti-robot wasn't in place, this site would not be manageable.

The thing that worries me is that over the last seven or eight years, I have backed away from web development to the point that I have forgotten most of what I learned early on. If I needed that knowledge right now I'd be stuffed.

Finally found my way back. My bookmark goes directly to the forum index, and it's been giving a 404 for a few days. Only now I discovered it had been moved to a new (old) URL.

Anyway the images are fine and everything loads really fast now.

I have worse things imagined for the extinction mob, but this being a "family friendly" site I cannot express my thoughts in gruesome detail.

However there's some things I could suggest - those that hang themselves from bridges, just leave them there - don't waste time on them.

For all those school kids who go on strike - turn off the air conditioners in your school during summer, to save some of those precious greenhouse gases getting out. Walk to school instead of being driven there by your parents. Don't catch the bus either.

All of these protesters should have to pay the police & court labour bill for wasted time. Those that break their bail conditions - straight to gaol.

Even those who glue themselves to the road or whatever - just leave them there - the toilet call will happen eventually - will they soil themselves? They won't even be able to brush the flies away.

There's so many ways to let their own actions backfire on them.

I don't recommend putting 'internal' links in favourites - especially when there is a risk of this type of attack continuing. At the very least, make another for the main page so announcements about any issues can be seen when they are posted, if the forums become unavailable.

As for the change, it is highly desired and something I wanted to keep when shifting the site off my own server. Unfortunately, at the time I was told the old structure that I had in place was not possible because they list all default documents on the web server in alphabetical order and this could not be changed for individual sites.

Being a web administrator for more than 20 years I knew this was BS but starting an argument about it was also something that I knew would lead to nothing. As it turns out, I was right and there is a function on the administration website where you can change the order or even invent your own default document names - the idiot I spoke to knew about the inclusion of it on their site as much as I did, which simply reflects modern customer service. The webhosting is something I have generally been happy with but at the end of the day, it is not on an 'enterprise' plan - it's budget plan and one gets what they pay for. Because the server is good, the compromise would be good service staff.

Mmh sure sounds like DDoS attacks to me.

Climate change is a big problem but with these people glueing themselves to stuff and making traffic jams is definitely not the way to make change. It's just another case of sheep following the heard with absolutely none of them giving a solution to the problem they just kick and scream to try and get their way.
I've been thinking of a solid way to support the grid in a clean way and I truely think the government should be heavily investing in nuclear fusion as its so SO much cleaner than current nuclear reactors when it comes to radioactive waste! And with the residual capacity they could run a electrolysis plant on seawater to make stupid amounts of hydrogen which could take the place of LPG in the city lines and/or the hydrogen could be used to run coal fired power stations with little conversation required. Just burn hydrogen instead of coal! Granted they would need to put in big pipes for this but if it literally cuts our power grid co2 emissions to zero so be it! That's just what I've come up with

Suggest implementing Cloudflare. It works very well on another site that I am a member of. Got rid of some 6,000 "guests" (aka pests).

Oh stuff the greenies, give me nitrocellulose, incandescent globes and a bit of lead in my paints and I'm happy to start a restoration.pete