The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Failure to get to forums - Intermittently

Got a Gateway error if I let it go long enough:
Gateway Timeout

The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or application.

Could get the the site home page without issue (pops right up) but the forum link there, or using my usual entry point of "Active Threads" was intermittent.

I've had similar problems most of the afternoon and evening. Also experienced delays for doing most actions of up to a minute or more for each function. Longer if I'm trying to make a post or reply.

Not sure if it's a direct or related cause, but we've had 75 IPs all in the 57.141.6.xx range showing as guests on line and the location says "Logging In" basically the entire time I've been on line (last 2+ hours). The screenshot below captures many of them.

A check of the "Info" for these IPs indicate they are all META Facebook "crawlers".

Just a follow up that this morning we have another batch of 75 guest IPs from META Facebook "crawlers", all showing as "Logging In" again.

Slightly different IP @ 57.141.4.XX range than yesterday's report.

Not experiencing function delays this morning, but can't help but think these "crawlers" aren't doing us any favors hanging around.

Some added info after doing a little web checking on my own.

The below description applies to these "crawlers", explaining it's function as taken from this FB Developers web page.

Basically for indexing Stovebolt content to train AI models and improve their content (supposedly).

Sounds like Paul could block that 57.141.4.xx IP address range and take care of the issue.

Yes, it's getting downright irritating. We get twice as much traffic from crawlers as we do from our own members, and it consistently degrades the performance when they show up. I'm already rate-limiting Googlebots, and i've blocked the googleusercontent networks completely. Looks like I'll also have to block the meta crawlers.

The least these jerks could do, if they want to feed their AI, is ask our permission.

Don't forget the meta crawlers from IP range 57.141.6.xx when blocking these buggers please and thanks. This group was doing the same thing yesterday as mentioned above.

Thanks as always Paul for your work in trying to make Stovebolt the best forums they can be!

Got another Gateway timeout just now.

A potload of 57.141.4 bots on. GRRR.

I just happened to try logging into the UBB forum just now and got the same 504 Gateway Timeout error. That got me wondering if it's a forum software issue, at least partially. That forum has way less member traffic than Stovebolt does.
Paul, I wonder if it's worth asking about it over there.