F1technical.net

Hi all,

Due to never ending performance hits by spam and AI bots we're going to enable Cloudflare "live" this evening.
Original plan was to do this in conjunction with server move but it's probably better to move this forward.

So switching around 21:00 CET / 19:00 GMT.

Any feedback regarding performance / availability would be very welcome!

Great to hear, hopefully this will improve website loading. Today was again quite bad.

It's still pretty bad right now.
Nearly 100% CPU load, 1354 users (1322 guests) online.

Guess that's good to see the effect.
Will switch a bit earlier, gives me more time to evaluate before end of day.

So far so good from this side. Normal and responsive on PC and on iphone.

Seems fine down here

Switched and working, but more or less continuing issues.
Currently again very high CPU load due to bots.

Can't complain now!
Earlier today it was indeed not that good.

I need to see my settings tomorrow to paste them here. I see that you had correctly enabled the "Under Attack Mode" but if you say there is still huge bot traffic then it needs something in config.
I had enabled only google bots and nothing else i think.
The forum behaves ok by the way and it's fast.

I only enabled attack mode at 15:00 CET today. Before that time bots were going crazy as cloudflare had badly confused them with a bad robots.txt.

Now all is super chill

Steven wrote: ↑

22 Sep 2025, 21:27

I only enabled attack mode at 15:00 CET today. Before that time bots were going crazy as cloudflare had badly confused them with a bad robots.txt.

Now all is super chill

Well done m8, many bravo for your effort and thank you.
Just you need to be certain that google at least needs to be white listed or there will be no new results in Google search from the forum. I don't remember if it is default like this, that's why i told you i will see tomorrow.

Thanks. All works fine here.

But the lag is not all because of the bots…
Activating Live beats the DDOS Peak a bit.
Since the last few months the cloud providers are receiving increasing visits…

Working great, just one thing: I did notice there are quite a lot of cloudflare checks, like after half an hour of inactivity the next page load will trigger a cloudflare check. Seems a bit much?

Juzh wrote: ↑

24 Sep 2025, 14:30

Working great, just one thing: I did notice there are quite a lot of cloudflare checks, like after half an hour of inactivity the next page load will trigger a cloudflare check. Seems a bit much?

Default was 30mins. Extended.
Thanks for the feedback.

Could this have inadvertently broken the mobile app?

Nice work guys - I hope this brings much needed stability to the site.