My title says it all.

Sometimes it responds immediately, but mostly it takes many seconds (into the 10s sometimes) to load the main site, then again to load "Recent Threads".

This is going to push people away, including long time users of the site.

Is this a bandwidth issue? A DB issue? An issue with an overwhelming number of bots swamping the site?

A discussion needs to be had about what can be done to keep this very valuable resource usable.

-stevieb

If you are browing Perlmonks using Google Chrome and are not logged in, your browser needs to send the sec-ch-ua header, otherwise your anonymous access to the site is blocked.

We are constantly being hit by crawlers claiming to be Google Chrome, so this is a first step in the rat race.

I noticed this new behaviour today -- I logged in, posted a Meditation, then used the same tab to go somewhere else. Half an hour later, I decided to come back to the site .. and I had to log in again.

So, just now, I visited the site, logged in, then opened a new tab (in the same browser window), and once again I was prompted to log in again. That's odd -- has anyone else noticed this behaviour? I'm using Firefox 136.0 (64-bit) on Ubuntu.

I believe it would be better to sort those, so that semantically identical URLs with CGI args will always have the same canonical "spelling", so one can most easily see at a glance whether one has previously visited them.

The browser shows the empty page loaded OK (200).

Over the past few days I see 20 - 40 second page load times for any page I've tried to access through https://perlmonks.org. For a typical page fetch (Perl Monks Discussion in this case) Firefox's Developer Tools reports:

Request Timing /?node=Perl Monks Discussion
Blocked:        8.22 s
DNS Resolution: 0 ms
Connecting:     203 ms
TLS Setup:      8.10 s
Sending:        0 ms
Waiting:        13.93 s
Receiving:      405 ms

Request Timing /?node=list replies toggle javascript
Blocked:        6.77 s
DNS Resolution: 3 ms
Connecting:     204 ms
TLS Setup:      6.56 s
Sending:        0 ms
Waiting:        394 ms
Receiving:      0 ms

Finish: 36.20s (The two fetches above are somewhat overlapped. Other f
+etches are ignored.)
[download]

I take it that many outages here are caused by misbehaving bots effectively causing a denial of service attack. Especially those bots ignoring no-follow settings.

Now often nodes here are linked not by ID but by name [name]

If the exact name is missing as node title, they cause a supersearch for all node titles containing the words (in any order).

These searches are very slow and I suppose expensive, since the results aren't cached.

Nodelets, which are constantly shown, contain many such links, especially behind ? marks, which until recently were missing real targets.

Now the question:

Could it be that such named-links turning into searches contribute to outages in the monastery?

(Beats me why this feature is display:none by default...)

Put this

a.nodelethead-annot { display:inline; float:left; font-size:smaller; padding-left:0.2em}

or this

a.nodelethead-annot { display:inline; float:right; font-size:smaller }

into your On-Site CSS Markup in Display Settings

and be surprised to see a little ? appearing in the nodelet titles, conveniently linking to the corresponding documentation.

DISCLAIMER: I'm no web-designer, if you have better CSS-suggestions, shoot away. :)

update

I found the Common CSS settings and filed a patch to activate this by globally by default.

Originally posted as a reply to New Feature: Claim anonymously posted nodes

I've never posted anything too personal or embarrassing but PM is the only site I use where I have absolutely no control or ownership of the content I generate. As long as everything written in this node is true, I'd really love a way to wash my hands of it all. Having my identity attached adds no real value to PM.

If you are logged in, you may now attempt to claim ownership of a node (root post or comment) currently owned by Anonymous Monk.

If you are directly viewing the node of interest, there will be a little link above the post saying "Claim this anonymous post" "Is this your post?".

Clicking this link just sends takes you to a form where you can send a canned message to the gods; it does not immediately give you ownership of the node.

When the gods get your request, they will review it and either grant or decline it. Either way, they will (probably) send you a message to that effect.

This feature is intended to mitigate the following common scenarios:

1. You intended to post as your logged-in user but somehow inadvertently were logged out when you posted.
2. You are a new user to the site and you created a user account after posting your first one or more posts, and would now like to own those posts.
3. You intentionally posted anonymously for some reason and now have changed your mind.

Feedback welcome!

Update: Based on feedback, I have moved the link a bit. It's now in the same place as the 'Edit' link which appears on nodes you can edit.
Note that putting it into a nodelet would be tricky, and surely more effort than it would be worth, at least at this time.

Update2: Based on feedback, I have reimplemented the link to take you to Message Outbox, with the recipient and message pre-loaded appropriately. You can then click "Deliver" to complete the request.