Slow load times.

[PseudoSABR]

Hey RP,

My load times are insanely slow--they have been for weeks, but today it takes as much as a minute for any page on TD to load. Maybe this problem is isolated to me, but it's been consistent and particular to this site. (I've tried using both Firefox and Chrome.)

[James]

It's not just you. TD is taking forever to load today.

[Mike Sixel]

Unsable. Maybe Brock can email us all when the site is fixed.

[Brock Beauchamp]

We're in the middle of a Denial of Service attack. I'm routing all traffic through a new service in hopes that it will thwart our Chinese and Russian friends who think it's fun to shut down a random Twins website with a bot attack.

[James]

Those Robot jerks.

[Mike Sixel]

Good luck Brock!

[raindog]

It's been like this for months. Not quite as bad as today has been, but bad.

[Brock Beauchamp]

I've been working on various things for the past two months but it turns out that part of the problem has been these DDoS attacks.

 

I have safeguards up in place now. You probably noticed a redirect screen that appears as it checks your browser. That is temporary and will go away soon... I've cranked up the security measures for a day or two while we figure out how to best prevent this in the future.

 

Apologies in advance to those of you using proxy servers and/or people visiting the site from Russia, China, India, Indonesia, or a handful of other places. They have been permanently blocked from accessing TwinsDaily.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Page loads are nearly instantaneous for me now.

 

Gee, all it took was banning half the world's population to do it.

[Nick Nelson]

Sorry about this folks. Obviously terrible timing with the issues taking place on the first newsworthy day of the offseason but we're lucky to have a really smart dood handling this stuff.

[Thrylos]

Page loads are nearly instantaneous for me now.

 

Gee, all it took was banning half the world's population to do it.

 

Fun.

 

Now if you can get rid of that flash...

 

[dgwills]

Not sure if I'm the only one, but I have to go into task manager and end task on the flash player to get the site to work properly. Otherwise it uses all my CPU and it makes everything extremely slow.

[Oldgoat_MN]

Think of all the pitchers who will grow up in Russia and China and won't even consider signing with the Twins because they couldn't get on here as children.

 

Alas, hackers suck today and endanger our competitiveness for the future.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Not sure if I'm the only one, but I have to go into task manager and end task on the flash player to get the site to work properly. Otherwise it uses all my CPU and it makes everything extremely slow.

 

I haven't seen this issue on my end of things. It could be your Flash player... No ad we're running *should* be able to crash the Flash player but given Flash's player's inherent instability, it could be the case. But it's not necessarily our site or anything we're doing... any site can cause Flash player to crash because it's, well, a piece of crap.

 

I know, I know... Flash sucks. Trust me, I hate it more than you guys, as I've had to deal with that piece of &*^% for a decade now. But on an ad-driven site where ad revenue is our main revenue stream, it's an unfortunate necessity.

 

If more ad companies started writing in Javascript or JQuery, I'd be all over it. But those languages are still extremely cumbersome when dealing with animation. Flash is really the only viable game in town.

[DaveW]

We're in the middle of a Denial of Service attack. I'm routing all traffic through a new service in hopes that it will thwart our Chinese and Russian friends who think it's fun to shut down a random Twins website with a bot attack.

Itstimetotakeit?

[nicksaviking]

We're in the middle of a Denial of Service attack. I'm routing all traffic through a new service in hopes that it will thwart our Chinese and Russian friends who think it's fun to shut down a random Twins website with a bot attack.

 

This version of Red Dawn is a lot less interesting. Hopefully the bots don't anthropomorphize, we don't have Swayze around to protect us anymore.

[TRex]

I'm not sure Charlie Sheen would be much help either !

[Rosterman]

Yeah, the day of the Mauer announcement and a horrible delay in reading about the resigning of Jason Bartlett was the killer. It ain't fun having a website in this world. Too many people trying to screw things up for the fun of it. Wait, Mauer is REALLY moving to first (already listed as an infielder on the Twins page 40-man Roster) and the Twins DID resign Bartlett!!!!!

[ashbury]

This version of Red Dawn is a lot less interesting. Hopefully the bots don't anthropomorphize, we don't have Swayze around to protect us anymore.

 

I for one welcome our new bot overlords.

[Thrylos]

This version of Red Dawn is a lot less interesting. Hopefully the bots don't anthropomorphize, we don't have Swayze around to protect us anymore.

 

But we got

.

[clutterheart]

I am in China and can view the website fine

But I have to type in a captcha before I can enter. I feel discriminated against and have called my local consulate officer to complain about your site.

She hung up on me.

[ashbury]

I for one welcome your new Captcha overlords.

[Guest USAFChief]

Itstimetotakeit?

There's no like button anymore...just wanted to say this was brilliant Dave.

[Brock Beauchamp]

For those of you wondering about the like button, I'm hoping it will make a return soon. I had to disable it in its current incarnation due to a possible security vulnerability caused by the overall software package, not the like button itself. I'm looking into other solutions and hope to have something up and running within a week or two.

[Brock Beauchamp]

I am in China and can view the website fine

But I have to type in a captcha before I can enter. I feel discriminated against and have called my local consulate officer to complain about your site.

She hung up on me.

 

Ah, good to know. I cranked down the security settings a bit after that first day of chaos and it appears that enables captcha-based entry instead of blocking the user entirely.

[TheLeviathan]

I want to check that it's just me....but is the site slow for anyone else the last few days? I think some of the ads are slaughtering my flash and it's causing some pages to really drag. I've had flash player crash multiple times in Chrome for me.

[ashbury]

I have my Adobe Flash turned off in Firefox, and I still frequently get "waiting for twinsdaily.com..." for half a minute at a time. Then at other times (such as now) it's fast enough to suit me. A few weeks ago I might have thought we were getting the overflow crowd from healthcare.gov, but that shouldn't be a problem now...

[Brock Beauchamp]

Half a minute? Really? I haven't seen a page load longer than five seconds in the past two weeks.

 

Anybody else?

[TheLeviathan]

Just to add a bit more, a few weeks back when you made the changes it was gloriously fast. For whatever reason this week it regressed for me. It's not every time which is reminiscent of when the rollover ads were crushing me.

[ashbury]

Half a minute? Really?

 

Yes. When it's like that I usually check Yahoo News or some other big site to see whether it's a problem with my connection, but it's usually just TD being slow to respond.