This forum topic will contain announcements from the team about any issues that are occuring for the OzBargain website and/or related services.
Site Issue Announcements
moocher on 14/04/2014 - 20:12
Last edited 15/04/2014 - 09:09
Last edited 15/04/2014 - 09:09
Comments
@Skramit: CSS files are static and cached at Cloudflare — so not likely affected by server load.
Does that happen when you are on mobile network, or home broadband? Were you on VPN?
I'm getting something odd going on with browsing deals from the front page.
All of the following pages are showing the same thing (pages 1, 2 and so on don't seem to be loading):
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/?page=1
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/?page=2Browsing deals from https://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals works fine.
I've tried clearing site data and cookies.
Happening on Firefox, Chrome and Edge on my main PC, also happening on Firefox on a second PC, and chrome on iOS, so I'm guessing this ISP, CDN or ozbargain.
I'm located in Hobart with ABB.
That should be fixed now.
Mighty quick work!
Thanks.
There is a DDoS attack ongoing. Cloudflare will detect and mitigate, but it won't always be seamless, so there may be more downtime on and off.
Thanks
Thanks, was wondering what was going on with Cloudflare / DB connection issues!
DDoS against OzBargain was detected and mitigated between 11:36-11:56AM AEDT. At the peak, 7.61M requests were blocked in a minute. The moderators had some idea who might be behind it as we were DDoS'ed twice previously so far this year, but those were done during early morning so our users were not affected.
Do these attack just come out of the blue or are the attackers after something?
@AncientWisdom: We had this Russian script kiddie that had asked to "speak to the manager" on our Facebook page, and claimed that he has "implemented xss code" to take down OzBargain, when in fact it was just DDoS. Not too sure what he is looking for, but from past experience probably just wants some BTC.
When I open ozbargain and leave the tab open for a while everything I click on just downloads a file. I'm using Edge browser, but it has happened in Chrome, only way to fix it is to complete close and restart the browser, closing the tab doesnt work. It only happens for this site, every other tab I have open at the time is fine, I have checked that Ctrl/Alt is not stuck.
What file did the browser want you to download? HTML file or something else?
If this only happens on the one device / computer it's possible it's a system or OS -related issue (e.g malware, a bad Chromium extension) and not with Ozbargain.
I've had the same issue trying to open a deal from Feedly RSS reader website sometimes from Chrome. Trying to open /live direct gets the same prompt to download. Same fix with browser restart.
I've only ever had it on my work machine, so assumed it was something work proxy related.
Won't be at work for a few weeks, but if this isn't resolved and it happens again, I'll save the file and check the content.
Pax
Yep, same thing work machine behind a proxy. Started about 2-3 months ago for me.
Looking at the properties it's all 57 bytes, file type is just "File". I noticed it only started doing this about 2-3 months ago.
I just got the same thing today in Chrome with the 57 byte file containing some sort of binary
ÿÿÿ ÿ
Accessing the same in Edge at the same time didn't see the same issue, and browser restart resolves it.
@binary101, Symantec WSS?
@pax: I see the squares when I hover over the drop-down tabs sometimes when the website starts downloading the "Files", it serves as an indicator that i need to restart my browser
i used to have a similar issue but with any website. turns out it was photoshop running in the background.
Top voters stats for comp store pages have been broken for a while, the top votes is much higher than actual total comps posted for stores I've seen
Are notifications delayed for anyone else? I'm getting reply notifications a good 15 minutes later.
I am getting notification of your comment pretty much straight away. Checked the logs and current lag is within milliseconds. Which post was it?
Only 40 people subscribed so it shouldn't take long to push all notifications out. No idea… If issue persists I'll just restart the queue server (like all the good engineers would do).
@scotty: The old "Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?" trick :P I guess it's just fixed itself now so all good.
The edit comment button is coming up after the 1 hour expiry window has ended.
That a good thing or bad thing?
🤔
Neither?
Comment cannot be edited:
Comment edit window expiredAlthough you can unpublish comments, as I just did to the comment above.
It's meant to hide itself after the 1 hour or when someone replies to your comment.
We now allow users to unpublish their own comments after 1 hour or after it has been replied.
How long has it been like that? I hadn’t noticed until now.
It was only changed early this morning.
Does it delete all the replies or only your own comment?
Users custom avatars have disappeared in the forums under 'last reply'.
I'll have that fixed later today.
Anyone else unable to revoke their vote on a deal? Once I click the + icon, I can't seem to click it again to remove it.
To revoke a vote, you need to click on the "votes" tab under title, which there's a link to revoke your vote.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/search/node
seems like an issue with the search bar whereby after entering the “go” button (on ios keyboard), shows the expanded sort menu rather than the search results. there is no search button either
I suddenly lost the navigation buttons on the bottom of the screen to filter through comments - e.g. I can select 'new comments' and then go left/right to catch up on the ones I've missed.
Happening on MS Edge both desktop and mobile.
Yeah there's some issues due to recent code change. I am investigating.
A small annoyance:
I noticed recently the addition of the expiring deals section. My thoughts on that are mine, but I noticed today that it was showing deals that don't show in the regular deals - because I have chosen not to see them. In this particular case, a couple of deals with shopback.
Do expiring deals not get passed through the users preferences before being displayed?
No. It's cached for all users / guests.
I'm having issues with the official OzB app on IOS 17.0. I keep getting 'Error with login token. Expired' and it just closes and reopens again. Are you looking into development of the app on IOS 17?
I don't think there will be any further development of OzBargain app.
Getting lots of Cloudflare issues this morning.
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
Sep 22, 2023 - 00:50 UTC
Investigating - Cloudflare is investigating issues with network performance. Customers may see increased 5xx errors and/or latency.We are working to analyse and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.
Sep 22, 2023 - 00:08 UTCThanks…
I'm getting an error message when I try to access OzBargain from my home internet: "403 Forbidden nginx/1.18.0".
Weirdly access works from my cellular internet and via my VPN. So it would appear the site is blocking my IP range? I normally just browse and rarely post/comment, so not sure why the block.
Working now from my home internet. Thanks!
Do you happen to have some apps on your iOS device that makes lots of requests on OzBargain simultaneously?
We recently deployed a script that automatically block IP addresses that make large number of requests rapidly, i.e. IP address will be blocked if exceeding limit of 20 requests/second for 5 times in 60 seconds. I had now removed your home IP from the blacklist.
Hi Scotty, thank you for your assistance.
I use Feedly on my iPhone - which is a RSS reader. It would appear that fetching the feed content may be triggering your blocking script?
I have issues when reloading the page. Look like a browser issue / System issue (office Laptop). It tries to download some file after leaving it open for couple of hours and reloading. This is with chrome and edge. Anyone else observed this behavior?
Are you going through a work proxy? Symantec WSS perchance?
Im being constantly logged out, as soon as I close a browser, I have to log back in.
Is this on purpose to pump up adsense income or a issue on me end?
Likely issue on your end. I have not noticed this issue.
That's a browser related issue, if you're getting logged out after exiting the app, that probably means your browser is deleting your cookies and basically terminating your user session upon exit.
Check your browser settings or find the 'reset settings to default' button if you are not sure what settings you might have changed recently.
Please also make sure your browser is up to date and that your time zone setting is correct.
Seems issue was with samsung internet. Switched to chrome and all ok.
Known Issue - Facebook login functionality disabled
Facebook has restricted our API access over the weekend without warning, and we are sorting this out with them. We hope that it will be resolved soon.
- If you don't use facebook to access OzBargain, this does not affect you
- If you do use facebook to log in to OzBargain, and
- You are currently logged in to OzBargain, this should not affect you until your OzBargain session times out (30 days from last login) and you need to log in again
- If you are logged out of OzBargain, and have never set a password on your OzBargain account, you won't be able to log in for now until facebook removes the restriction.
This has now been resolved
This appears to not have been resolved and it may take a while to work through with facebook. Apologies for the inconvenience.
For those affected - I would suggest setting a password on OzBargain through the reset password functionality and use your username/password to login to OzBargain instead of facebook.
The facebook login issues should be resolved now.
Known Issue - Mail Delivery Failures for icloud.com, me.com, mac.com
OzBargain emails to @icloud.com, @me.com and @mac.com are being rejected. We are looking into it.
We've been in contact with icloud postmaster and they've made some changes on their end, but we're still seeing a few emails rejected. Hopefully it will be sorted very soon.
Please note that we are experiencing a DDOS so you may experience issues accessing OzBargain. You also may be prompted with some confirmations through Cloudflare.
Yeah got one just now.
Looks like someone got triggered from a community post (or posted a shit deal) and decided to go nuclear with a DDOS attack, lol.
Was affecting Whirlpool too (they acknowledged it was affecting OzB as well). Browsing both sites last night and getting various errors I did have a 'is it them or me' moment.
Would you be able to share the throughout of traffic OzB was being hit with?
Last night was around 12:20-1:20AM. CloudFlare blocked around 1M requests, however there were still around 10x the traffic than usual.
We got 2M between 23:55–00:15 and then 5M between 13:00–13:30
This was happening around midnight as well and on various occasions throughout today.
Ohh thanks for letting us know. I churned to exetel yesterday and started having ozb issues so thought that was causing it!
Did the issue start last night? I was getting errors occasionally
Unable to connect to database server
Yep got the slower authentication dialogues. But still successfully arrived to site. Good luck!
I wonder what is the motivation for attacking OzBargain? Gerry and his professionals?
Nah. I'll bet its The Athlete's Foot and their $30 vouchers.
Yer when I load up ozbargin I get a thing saying making sure ozbargin is secure etc
Never had this before today
See above
It appears another DDoS attack between 12:15-1:15AM AEDT this morning with ~4.8M requests on the home page. CloudFlare only manages to block 102k requests as attack mode is off.
~4.8M requests
Just out of curiosity, what were the requests?
Opening the home page of the website.
Does a DDoS attack mean they are trying to gain users' details or simply take the website down?
Take the site down. Not specifically crafted requests trying to poke holes in security. Just lots of them making our backend to busy to serve other regular requests.
Are you able to temporarily block the countries where the fraudulent requests are coming from?
Distributed denial of service attack — they are from everywhere, a lot from Australia as well.
as attack mode is off
How come?
It’s not supposed to be on all the time.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/und…
It is designed to be used as one of the last resorts when a zone is under attacked (and will temporarily pause access to your site and impact your site analytics).
Wondered why I was getting CF'd on every refresh.
Also opened a link in incognito and since it links through OzB had to do the captcha.
Good luck!The same, very annoying. And some times I can't close the pop up windows and my browser crashed..
Same, glad I bothered to google about it.
I was about to blow all my devices away expecting something was compromised.
I guess this is the reason the RSS feed URLs are also redirecting to CloudFlare?
I came to check here because the app is no longer working due to the cloudflare challenge. Posting just to follow any updates.
Any clues as to whom may have the grudge? Gerry Harvey? A recently banned user?
Epstein files release ?
Ooof - app is not happy today. Keep getting network error and nothing will load - assuming because everything is going through cloudfare.
@RichardL: Okay thanks. Been happening a lot in the last month or so. I’ve never noticed before that. Can it also be a server load issue?