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Suddenly no visitors in forum

Started by pepf, November 01, 2021, 07:55:55 PM

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pepf

Since about a month ago forum members have stopped coming. That is even registered members that have been coming for years do not show up. SE are still coming and very few 'guests' are shown. Any idea what could be causing this?
(The site this forum is connected to seems to have normal traffic.)

TIA, Peter

shadav

anything changed in the forum since then? any new mods? changed settings?
any errors in the admin or sever errors?

pepf

Thanks for answering.
Only installed Optimus in this period, but did not touch it after installation. Can this affect anything?

I should clarify that two mods and one member still do access the forum. Today, I also changed htacess to an older backup to make sure that no later modification did block any IPs that shouldn't be.

There are only the usual errors. There is a spam bot which is banned, however, which attempts to access  a dozen or more times very day, changing IPs every two attempts. But this also has been going on for quite a few months without causing further problems.

Kindred

if you are banning IPs, then it certainly could affect regular users.

Banning spambots by IP is useless.  Just stop them form registering in the first place and you don't have to worry about bans
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Украинi

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shadav

banning by ip as stated is useless, they'll just use a new ip
and ips are recycled so banning by ip in the end you are banning potential users

installing optimus  mod shouldn't affect anything unless it didn't install correctly and you would see some errors on your site, in your admin, or in server logs

are you using httpBL mod? I ran into an issue with it not allowing anyone that uses ipv6 to access the forum (myself the admin/owner included) easy enough for me to fix once I knew what the issue was to switch my device to use ipv4 so I could log in and turn off and remove the mod so that others could use the forum again. Woke up one morning to find that I couldn't access any of my sites, my internet provider started using ipv6 which my new computer was setup to use if it was available so that was fun  :P

another issue I ran into was for example pretty urls, needed to change a setting and not rewrite some urls because users weren't able to actually accept the privacy policy to be able to access the forum because it wasn't rewriting it correctly.

not now but before one of my sites some mod broke my captcha so users under 10 posts weren't able to post and no one could register.

Just throwing some things out there to give you ideas, while you may think everything is working fine, it might not actually be working as expected.

if you aren't seeing any errors in your admin or server logs
may help to make a test account and go through the registration process and then through profile settings and try to create a post and try to reply to a post and so forth just to test and make sure all is good

pepf

Thanks for all the suggestions. No, there is no httpBL mod.
And I do not use IP blocking for the said spambot. It is trying to access in short intervals, but the email or user name do not change so adding it to the ban list was sufficient. The IP blocking in combination with email blocking has reduced spam from certain Eastern European countries. I doubt that this is the source of the problem, but I have been doubting whether I have made an error with the htaccess syntax ending up blocking everything. There was a new sign registration and a post from a registered member today, so not sure what it is yet. But yes, going through a whole registration process of a new member and testing is a good idea.
Thanks a lot.

landyvlad

Do you have an alternate means of contacting any members you see often but haven't logged on? If so maybe ask them if they are having problems?
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