Internal Server Error

I'm on Coastside Fishing Club and they don't have this issue at all. I don't know anything about this type of stuff, but that won't stop me from having an opinion

I'm assuming it is because on Coastside you have to pay to get access to the goods / posts, so I'm assuming the bots can't crawl it. On NCKA, there are a meaningful number of posts that the general public can see, so I'm assuming the bots can crawl it.

Ideally there would be some configuration fix to stop the bots. If not, I'd welcome restricting the site in the same way Coastside does. It wouldn't have to be the same $25 / year. I'm assuming it could be any amount for any period of time, and that would be enough. Paying a small amount for the site to work, and saving me / us the frustration of "internal server error", would be a good trade in my book.

Best,
Stewart

One more thing... every time I click on something on the site, I get a shot of anxiety combined with cortisol wondering if the site will work or not (I'm only half joking...)

When I get the error, the anxiety turns to frustration and anger, which probably secretes some other chemical in my body that's not good for me. And then I have to go kayak fishing to reset.

I'm sure others are in the same boat as me. For our health, it would be great to fix it   And if paying a small amount is what it would take, so be it. There's no price you can put on our health

I'm on Coastside Fishing Club and they don't have this issue at all. I don't know anything about this type of stuff, but that won't stop me from having an opinion

I'm assuming it is because on Coastside you have to pay to get access to the goods / posts, so I'm assuming the bots can't crawl it. On NCKA, there are a meaningful number of posts that the general public can see, so I'm assuming the bots can crawl it.

Ideally there would be some configuration fix to stop the bots. If not, I'd welcome restricting the site in the same way Coastside does. It wouldn't have to be the same $25 / year. I'm assuming it could be any amount for any period of time, and that would be enough. Paying a small amount for the site to work, and saving me / us the frustration of "internal server error", would be a good trade in my book.

Best,
Stewart

It's really down to the value of actual organic human content in this day and age. The internet is increasingly filled with ai/bot generated slop, and ai companies, ad companies, skeevy scammers, etc. all are starved for content that is created by humans. Messageboards are kindof gold mines for this sort of thing, as they tend to be older so it's public, genuine human-made content that is old/established, all sorts of uses for that sort of thing and these shitbag companies (some legitimate, many not) are scraping the hell out of them.

My own videogame messageboard went from 10-20 bots max concurrent to about 1000 bots max, it was crushing the board. But I didn't want to make it fully private either as we often have returning old members when they realize that board is still active after 15+ years, so yeah.... I had to use cloudflare (free, but takes some work to configure) to very aggressively check for bots, ban nearly all overseas traffic, etc. I'm back down to about 10ish bots now and it's been great.

After some poking around I noticed this forum at least is already using cloudflare which is great! But I don't know which admin was most responsible for technical setup and/or most familiar with fiddling with cloudflare to tighten things down more.

NCKA's owner is Allen/Polepole but he's busy traveling right now.

It's really down to the value of actual organic human content in this day and age. The internet is increasingly filled with ai/bot generated slop, and ai companies, ad companies, skeevy scammers, etc. all are starved for content that is created by humans. Messageboards are kindof gold mines for this sort of thing, as they tend to be older so it's public, genuine human-made content that is old/established, all sorts of uses for that sort of thing and these shitbag companies (some legitimate, many not) are scraping the hell out of them.

My own videogame messageboard went from 10-20 bots max concurrent to about 1000 bots max, it was crushing the board. But I didn't want to make it fully private either as we often have returning old members when they realize that board is still active after 15+ years, so yeah.... I had to use cloudflare (free, but takes some work to configure) to very aggressively check for bots, ban nearly all overseas traffic, etc. I'm back down to about 10ish bots now and it's been great.

After some poking around I noticed this forum at least is already using cloudflare which is great! But I don't know which admin was most responsible for technical setup and/or most familiar with fiddling with cloudflare to tighten things down more.

It's good to know that there is hope of getting this site back to something more like normal.

Wrt the Internet being filled with AI slop, I could not agree more. Already, about half of the videos that YouTube tries to feed me are clearly AI-generated garbage. The next step in the evolution will undoubtedly be AI slop that is trained on the current (first) generation of AI slop, followed by 3rd generation AI slop trained on 2nd generation AI slop, and so on...

NCKA's owner is Allen/Polepole but he's busy traveling right now.

good to know!

I have the exact same experience on Coastside, zero issues at all thwre and I too would gladly pay a membership fee here to leave these issues behind.

I have the exact same experience on Coastside, zero issues at all thwre and I too would gladly pay a membership fee here to leave these issues behind.

I'm not opposed to paying, but that would likely make the appeal of this site even more selective.

Does this "Internal Server Error" thing happen on other free sites? I've never encountered it anywhere else.

Read my posts above, it's almost certainly caused by heavy load from bots/scrapers.

So I've been thinking about launching a new board, using much more modern software with all the nice doodads available these days:
* easy mobile browsing
* easy photo uploads (including simple copy and paste into post)
* reaction buttons for posts
* inline video pastes from youtube and all sorts of other video sources
* @membername notifications to flag people's attention
* google auth integration (no password needed if you have a google account)
* more powerful polling options
* robust messaging and clean email notifications (subscribe to certain posts, users, forums, whatever)
* anti-spam/bot measures
* a whole lot more

by design, much of the board would be private, avoiding aggressive/annoying crawling by AI bots. Not looking to be some huge board, quality over quantity of users - looking to build tight knit community.

Anyhow, been thinking on it for over a year now, but finally bit the bullet. I already run a very long-lived community (going close to 20 years now) so adding another board wasn't too hard at all.

It still needs work but I've got it up and running here if anyone wants to have a look.

https://westcoastkayakfishing.com/

Obviously not trying to supplant NCKA, I'm a bit of an archivist at heart and I don't believe there's any way to replace the enormous amount of great content and history and community of this board. But I also think there's something to be said for more modern amenities that come w/modern software.

Anyone welcome to join. Note that I intentionally require at least 5 posts (an intro post, and at least 4 more threads or comments to pre-existing topics I added) before you get access to private forums. In the future if I get enough traction, I'm definitely going to expand the private forums and encourage most of the posting to happen there.

If you're super impatient, and are an established poster here, at LEAST make an intro post, then email me at maethlin @ gmail.com (or just post in your intro thread) asking me to manually bump you up to Captain level and I'll make it happen.

p.s. I conned Joe to help me mod the site but I doubt he's even had a chance to log in yet, just got done with it today.

Read my posts above, it's almost certainly caused by heavy load from bots/scrapers.

I read the post. However, I've never had this problem on other sites, even those with lots of potentially valuable archived content (e.g., the Hobie forum), so I can't understand why it is happening here...

It gets pretty technical but in a nutshell, it's about using some service to lock down the site from attack/crawling.

5-10 years ago, you could totally get away with not doing that. Today? No chance.

Cloudflare is by far the most popular service to use for this, but there are several others.

So the other forums you are referring to probably use Cloudflare.

NCKA uses Cloudflare already as well, but you have to configure it very tightly these days. There are lots of ways to configure CF, from just putting soft speed bumps in the way of crawlers/bots, to putting a giant barrier that blocks 100% of all non-US traffic, and then closely inspects even the US traffic for any weirdness.

These days, you have to lean towards the latter scenario.