Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Issues Loading the SM Website

Issues Loading the SM Website

chempyre235 - 24-10-2025 at 05:27

I've been having problems loading pages on this site for the past three or four days and based on the short list of visitors in the last 24 hours, I suspect I'm not alone in this. Do any of the mods know what the problem is?

Radiums Lab - 24-10-2025 at 06:24

I am also facing similar issues from past few days.

DraconicAcid - 24-10-2025 at 13:18

Same here (on mulltiple computers).

RedDwarf - 24-10-2025 at 15:21

I've been having the same issue for several months, the website becomes unavailable for a period time (greater than an hour, sometimes several).

Admagistr - 24-10-2025 at 17:07

Yes, it happens to me too. It's unpleasant...

esquizete_electrolysis - 26-10-2025 at 12:56

I’ve noticed as well. Usually the https portion of the site remains unloadable, but the http service remains up most of the time.

chempyre235 - 27-10-2025 at 06:21

It seems at least for now, the loading issues have subsided over the weekend.

Sulaiman - 27-10-2025 at 07:31

I have had problems with SM lately - something has changed recently.
Also, if I have more than one tab open with SM, things may go really slow.
(so, check for unused tabs)

I am using chrome on android.

BromicAcid - 27-10-2025 at 16:17

If I recall correctly this was brought up a few months ago, Polverone stepped in and said the issue is that the site is being constantly scraped for AI learning/training and that is overwhelming the server.

It was mentioned in this thread:
https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=16...

[Edited on 10/28/2025 by BromicAcid]

chempyre235 - 28-10-2025 at 06:34

I'd forgotten about that until you brought it up (I even posted on that thread

). I saw that someone had suggested using a CAPTCHA, but services like CloudFlare are designed to limit bot traffic and speed up websites and networks without having to perform tasks. I've got no idea of pricing, though. However, it seems to be commonly used even on sites whose hosts I wouldn't expect to have much funding, so maybe it's feasible.

Twospoons - 19-11-2025 at 12:16

This is still a problem. I've been unable to access SM for days at a time.

mayko - 19-11-2025 at 18:59

might be the first time I've seen this...

violet sin - 19-11-2025 at 20:46

I've had trouble as well. To me I could usually seem to get in like once a day, but later in the day it would time out over and over. Some times it's been a few days in a row, I always chocked it up to my poor coverage and mint mobile service provider. But... It sounds like a larger problem and my suspicions anecdotal at best.

j_sum1 - 19-11-2025 at 22:22

Not ideal, but I have found a workaround that works much of the time.

View the http version of the site instead of https.

[Edited on 20-11-2025 by j_sum1]

bnull - 22-11-2025 at 05:14

Frigging flaming hell. I was reading a post and clicked to open one of the attachments on a new tab when, all of a sudden, I get a 403 forbidden anywhwre in the tree. Emptied the cache, tried a private tab. Nothing.

This is the first time a see a 403 here. As I write, I'm accessing the forum through VPN (I'm not in Japan).

Radiums Lab - 22-11-2025 at 05:34

@j_sum1 mentioned a workaround for this in the Secret Santa thread, it works good for me.

[Edited on 22-11-2025 by Radiums Lab]

bnull - 22-11-2025 at 08:05

I had been using that trick occasionally but it does nothing to the 403.

Keras - 22-11-2025 at 11:33

It seems to be better since a couple of days. Might be the server which ran out of VM?

beta4 - 23-11-2025 at 06:18

After a long time away from this forum, today I try to connect back and keep getting "Connection timeout". At first I was worried this corner of the internet was gone, but after some more digging I found the website just became so slow that the browser times out every time.

For those having the same problem, here's how I "fixed" it. I'm using Firefox, went to about :config and increased the following timeouts to 300 seconds:

network.http.connection-timeout
network.http.tls-handshake-timeout

Although with this trick I can login and browse the forum, it is so slow that every page load takes minutes so it's far from a real fix.

Since it looks like the slowdown issue is due to AI bots crawling it massively, may I suggest to the sysadmins to install anubis?

https://anubis.techaro.lol/

It's a firewall designed specifically to stop AI crawlers, and I've seen it used effectively for other websites sharing the same problem. I've never installed it or configured it though, so I do not have direct experience with it.

Radiums Lab - 5-12-2025 at 19:31

This forum is finally running after several days. I was scared that this was dead.

greenlight - 5-12-2025 at 20:08

Are the downtimes going to get increasingly longer until one day it never comes back?

Was quite worried for those three days too.

Radiums Lab - 5-12-2025 at 20:19

I noticed one thing tho, Polverone was online after many days. He might have fixed it.

bnull - 6-12-2025 at 02:54

Here's another thing: the number of "guests" goes from 300-400 when the forum is running smooth to over 1200 when it becomes unstable.

I hope this AI bubbles bursts and takes the parent companies down with them.

[Edited on 6-12-2025 by bnull]

BromicAcid - 6-12-2025 at 05:56

Quote: Originally posted by bnull

Here's another thing: the number of "guests" goes from 300-400 when the forum is running smooth to over 1200 when it becomes unstable.

I hope this AI bubbles bursts and take the parent companies down with them.

It is insane to me, our forum used to have to have at most 20 or so guests on at a time, now it's never not in the hundreds, and of course these are not real people. Sadly we used to usually have more members active than guests at any given time but usually it's just one or two of us on the main page.

bnull - 7-12-2025 at 02:35

The last time I checked yesterday we had 268 "guests". Right now we have 558.

bnull - 8-12-2025 at 07:44

704 "guests": http plus talk works, https plus whisper does not.

chempyre235 - 10-12-2025 at 12:32

I've just now been able to get on the SM forum pages. As of even this morning, it hadn't been working. Was able to log on about five days ago, then endless loading and error messages until now.

Not even the http/talk trick had been working.

[Edited on 12/10/2025 by chempyre235]

Radiums Lab - 10-12-2025 at 16:08

I used to hate that human verification thing in other websites, now I understood its importance.

RogueRose - 12-12-2025 at 20:48

I was having problems loading the site for at least 12 days or so. My browser history only goes back that far b/c of an OS reload. This is the first time I was able to load the site for at least that long. Does anyone know how long the site was having problems? I'm in the US if that matters..