SQL ERROR _ GENERAL BOARD ERROR

Have an idea for a new feature? Want to see an extension or style added from the phpBB database? Tell us here and we will consider it.
User avatar
bondagefreak
Honorary Member
Honorary Member
Posts: 5478
Joined: 6 years ago
Location: Québec
Contact:

SQL ERROR _ GENERAL BOARD ERROR

Post by bondagefreak »

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User 'tieupgam_admin' has exceeded the 'max_user_connections' resource (current value: 30) [1226]
An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.
___________________________________


I think most of us have been coming across this error message once every third or fourth click for about 24 hours now.
It seems to coincide with an unexplained explosion of guest accounts, the vast majority of whom I suspect are not actual people.

We normally have between 100 and 200 guests on the forum at any given time, but for the past day or two, it's been at around 500.
Just thought I'd sound the alarm bell. @chadmc90 @Johnsnow
User avatar
Xtc
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 3428
Joined: 6 years ago
Location: Not deep enough into the Forest

Post by Xtc »

Thanks.
You probably know that I am not a "techie" and can do nothing about it myself.
They all say boxer shorts are cool,
but little Speedos always rule.
User avatar
chadmc90
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 738
Joined: 6 years ago

Post by chadmc90 »

Sorry. Have been slammed with work and personal stuff these past few weeks.

You are right. It is likely due to the large influx of "users" since there seems to be a limit set by the hosting provider. I will see what I can do about it soon.
User avatar
Solarbeast
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 1134
Joined: 6 years ago
Location: Florida

Post by Solarbeast »

Has this been fixed yet? This is the first time in 16 hours that I could get on and click on things, so I'm hoping this is either fixed or being worked on now.
abcdefsmith3
Forum Contributer
Forum Contributer
Posts: 99
Joined: 5 years ago
Location: UK

Post by abcdefsmith3 »

Same! It’s sad how much you realise you miss this website when you can’t access it! 😂
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

I'm very grateful to all those who worked on resolving the issue or issues. Not easy these days to keep a forum like this up and running on a volunteer basis. Whether it was crawler bots feeding LLMs, bot accounts, some technical scripting glitch, or something completely different, I'm just glad the forum is accessible again and running smoothly.
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

O well, just got the error again. Nearly every click. Still an issue it seems.
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
User avatar
Blue Ice
Forum Contributer
Forum Contributer
Posts: 3
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Post by Blue Ice »

Hello ^^ I receive this message too and I was a bit afraid no longer being able to connect to this site or worse, having my profile deleted :/
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

Blue Ice wrote: 3 months ago Hello ^^ I receive this message too and I was a bit afraid no longer being able to connect to this site or worse, having my profile deleted :/
Hello @Blue Ice and everyone else reading this thread.

Please be patient as the administrators and their volunteer helpers try to resolve these issues. Note that no one is being paid or making money off this forum; those who run this forum do so purely through volunteer, unpaid (and sadly often ungratefully unrecognized), hard work, while holding up real life jobs and living with the constant demands of real lives outside this forum.

If you are like me and not an expert in SQL databases, or otherwise not Internet and online blog savvy, there are still things you can do to help, whether a registered user or an unregistered guest. I do these myself.

1) Login or browse ONLY and absolutely ONLY through the https link. The verbatim link, without the extra white spaces between the letters and punctuation marks, should be exactly 22 characters long as follows (without the blank spaces)

h t t p s : / / t u g s t o r i e s . c o m

That 's' after the first p is super important. If it is not there, you are logging in or browsing on a unsecured (even if through a VPN) connection, and the entire world, if not the universe is intercepting your non-encrypted network traffic (even if through a secured VPN). Never ever connect to a non-https URL, unless you absolutely know what you are doing and are getting into.

Moreover, it is super-important that the link you use to start browsing or logging in has exactly those 22 characters and nothing else. If there are other characters between the backslash and the word starting with tug, you are connecting through a pirated or otherwise illegitimate site that is most likely using crawler bots to data mine this forums stories and re-post them as its own, contributing to the SQL errors we all see. Likewise, if you see characters after the .com that are not php related (like .com.atlaq.com) you are either connecting to one of many WHOIS information sites (so not actually linking to the forum) or, if you do see the stories pop up, again connecting through a non-legit site. To make sure you are still on the legit site, the only characters you should see after .com is a backslash immediately followed by a /viewtopic.php? string or other similar .php codes.

2) DO NOT have multiple tabs or windows opened to the forum. Unless you are an administrator or one of their explicitly elevated helpers, there is no technical reason to have multiple connections to the forum. Each tab in a browser, each browser window, each "remember me" login, contributes to the simultaneously active connection count and query count to the SQL database (this forum's content). If you absolutely want to keep track of multiple stories and threads, at the exact location you have caught up to, do so using a separate and free text file editor and copy-past the URLs into it. You can easily obtain the URL for the page you are on by copying the URL from the tab you have open, and then adding some textual notes about how far down the page your point of interest is. For example, I have in a text file the following

My last two sentence: https://tugstories.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... start=250# (about two-thirds down the page)

I now can link to my last time I wrote a two-sentence story, without having to keep that tab open all the time, whether as a registered user or as a guest.

3) If you do manage to login, check your "Remember Me" login keys, under User Control Panel, Profile tab, Manage "Remember Me" login keys option. I'm not sure all those login keys contribute or not, but just to be on the safe side, I've deleted all of mine. Now, whenever I login, I deliberately keep the Remember Me unchecked, as I do not need that functionality anyway.

I'm not trying to be preachy or anything like that. I'm not a network guru; I'm merely trying to help and mitigate the issue until it is fully resolved.

Good luck everyone.
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
User avatar
Blue Ice
Forum Contributer
Forum Contributer
Posts: 3
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Post by Blue Ice »

tiedinbluetights wrote: 3 months ago
Blue Ice wrote: 3 months ago Hello ^^ I receive this message too and I was a bit afraid no longer being able to connect to this site or worse, having my profile deleted :/
Hello @Blue Ice and everyone else reading this thread.

Please be patient as the administrators and their volunteer helpers try to resolve these issues. Note that no one is being paid or making money off this forum; those who run this forum do so purely through volunteer, unpaid (and sadly often ungratefully unrecognized), hard work, while holding up real life jobs and living with the constant demands of real lives outside this forum.

If you are like me and not an expert in SQL databases, or otherwise not Internet and online blog savvy, there are still things you can do to help, whether a registered user or an unregistered guest. I do these myself.

1) Login or browse ONLY and absolutely ONLY through the https link. The verbatim link, without the extra white spaces between the letters and punctuation marks, should be exactly 22 characters long as follows (without the blank spaces)

h t t p s : / / t u g s t o r i e s . c o m

That 's' after the first p is super important. If it is not there, you are logging in or browsing on a unsecured (even if through a VPN) connection, and the entire world, if not the universe is intercepting your non-encrypted network traffic (even if through a secured VPN). Never ever connect to a non-https URL, unless you absolutely know what you are doing and are getting into.

Moreover, it is super-important that the link you use to start browsing or logging in has exactly those 22 characters and nothing else. If there are other characters between the backslash and the word starting with tug, you are connecting through a pirated or otherwise illegitimate site that is most likely using crawler bots to data mine this forums stories and re-post them as its own, contributing to the SQL errors we all see. Likewise, if you see characters after the .com that are not php related (like .com.atlaq.com) you are either connecting to one of many WHOIS information sites (so not actually linking to the forum) or, if you do see the stories pop up, again connecting through a non-legit site. To make sure you are still on the legit site, the only characters you should see after .com is a backslash immediately followed by a /viewtopic.php? string or other similar .php codes.

2) DO NOT have multiple tabs or windows opened to the forum. Unless you are an administrator or one of their explicitly elevated helpers, there is no technical reason to have multiple connections to the forum. Each tab in a browser, each browser window, each "remember me" login, contributes to the simultaneously active connection count and query count to the SQL database (this forum's content). If you absolutely want to keep track of multiple stories and threads, at the exact location you have caught up to, do so using a separate and free text file editor and copy-past the URLs into it. You can easily obtain the URL for the page you are on by copying the URL from the tab you have open, and then adding some textual notes about how far down the page your point of interest is. For example, I have in a text file the following

My last two sentence: https://tugstories.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... start=250# (about two-thirds down the page)

I now can link to my last time I wrote a two-sentence story, without having to keep that tab open all the time, whether as a registered user or as a guest.

3) If you do manage to login, check your "Remember Me" login keys, under User Control Panel, Profile tab, Manage "Remember Me" login keys option. I'm not sure all those login keys contribute or not, but just to be on the safe side, I've deleted all of mine. Now, whenever I login, I deliberately keep the Remember Me unchecked, as I do not need that functionality anyway.

I'm not trying to be preachy or anything like that. I'm not a network guru; I'm merely trying to help and mitigate the issue until it is fully resolved.

Good luck everyone.

@tiedinbluetights thanks a lot for all this informations, thank you! :D

I'm patient don't worry for that ^^ I know that behind the profile is a real person :D
Bigballgag1
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 706
Joined: 5 years ago

Post by Bigballgag1 »

Is anyone else finding this error is getting worse and much more frequent? Not sure if the admins have been able to look into this yet but it is making the forum unusable at certain times.

Not a moan btw, just thought it was worth flagging to see if there was any update. I appreciate it is a busy time of year and the admins do lots of appreciated work behind the scenes already. :)
TickleTorture
Forum Contributer
Forum Contributer
Posts: 75
Joined: 5 years ago

Post by TickleTorture »

I know the mods are technies and it's not your fault but it has continued to get worse where many days the site isn't usable. Which is a shame, it's a great site
Image
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

.copy of next.
Last edited by tiedinbluetights 1 month ago, edited 1 time in total.
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

Site Admin has already responded under a Comments and Suggestions thread here:

https://tugstories.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 96#p171196

NOTE: I had to reload several times to get this through, but that just contributes to the site getting down. Constant refresh attempts by a human is exactly what the crawler bot attacks are doing, but at a rate of hundreds of times in just one second. As a human, you just can't compete with that.

So be patient if you get the errors, and stay away for "hours" or "days" not just "seconds", because with constant refresh requests you are then contributing to the "heavy traffic" and then the site host disabling it for 24 hour periods. Those crawler bots are scraping the site and new posts (like this one, guilty as charged), until the admins implement a fix, simply encourage the a**holes behind the bots to keep on scraping.

Good luck fellow humans
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
User avatar
tiedinbluetights
Centennial Club
Centennial Club
Posts: 627
Joined: 2 years ago
Location: Canada

Post by tiedinbluetights »

Just got the error again a few moments ago; hopefully it was just a fluke and the bots haven't returned en masse, but felt it wise to give a heads up @chadmc90, @JonSnow and @Xtc .
💙 Love to be tied-up 💙
I read and write stories for fun
Open to friendly PMs
(I don't do roleplays nor story requests)
AlexUSA3
Millennial Club
Millennial Club
Posts: 1306
Joined: 2 years ago

Post by AlexUSA3 »

tiedinbluetights wrote: 1 month ago Just got the error again a few moments ago; hopefully it was just a fluke and the bots haven't returned en masse, but felt it wise to give a heads up @chadmc90, @JonSnow and @Xtc .
I have had it several times in the past 24 hours as well.
CGC Short Stories (F+f+/F+f+): viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20527
Find my other CGC Stories in the same link above!

Image
User avatar
Xtc
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 3428
Joined: 6 years ago
Location: Not deep enough into the Forest

Post by Xtc »

THanks for the heads up. I hope @chadmc90 and @Johnsnow pick it up. I'm useless at tech.
They all say boxer shorts are cool,
but little Speedos always rule.
AlexUSA3
Millennial Club
Millennial Club
Posts: 1306
Joined: 2 years ago

Post by AlexUSA3 »

@Xtc, @chadmc90, @Johnsnow, I can confirm another attack. Since yesterday, the number of "unregistered users" on the page has jumped from the 100-150 range to over 300. The number of "general board error" messages I got raised with that number.
CGC Short Stories (F+f+/F+f+): viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20527
Find my other CGC Stories in the same link above!

Image
Post Reply Previous topicNext topic