The message board is currently offline again. I have a support ticket in place but I’m 90% certain this is another instance of bot traffic, to which phpBB (the software that runs the board) seems very attractive.
This is bringing me closer and closer to a moment of truth. And the truth is that the message board is on life support. There are, to put it bluntly, something shy of a handful of users who log on with any regularity. It’s rare that there’s a new post that’s not just me announcing new material on the main site. Part of this goes back several years to some mistakes I made running the board (and frankly not paying much attention to it) but this is not an uncommon fate for a lot of these old-school message boards. So many seem to be losing old users and not attracting new ones.
All this would be fine expect for the fact that it’s becoming more and more of a nightmare to keep the damned thing running. Between bogus registrations from spammers and server issues from (mostly) AI bots, the board is 80% of my headaches with the site. And despite the famed 80-20 rule, it’s not anywhere even near 20% of my legitimate traffic.
I want to keep the content available because there’s twenty years of great history threads on the board. I’m looking into ways to migrate it to a less bot-attractive platform as a read-only site. Frankly, though, it’s just not worth the effort to put in hours setting up Cloudflare or whatever trying to keep it alive for new posts when there aren’t any (even from me) and aren’t likely to be in the future. I think this is a lot of why Aaron gave up on RetailWatchers a few years ago. Fortunately, another user took it over and kept it going, and I’m happy to talk to anyone who may have an interest in doing that with the Groceteria board. But I’m not optimistic.
UPDATE: The issue in this case was not the bots but it was “bot-adjacent.” There was a DNS update on a bot-mitigation tool that was not made (or incorrectly made) by my webhost following a server migration this weekend. The board is running without it right now until they get it updated, so it may be a little bumpy for a bit.