Forum is back up.

It figures that I get an e-mail from the domain host's support people just as I publish the previous post and let the meds knock me out.

So the Crazy Meds Talk forum is up and running again.

For those who care about such things, we got hit by two performance-killing search engine bots, Yahoo Slurp and Yandex.

The Yahoo Slurp bot seems to be causing people problems all over the place. It was doing all sorts of unnecessary stuff to collect data for a search engine. Like getting the last post and the newest post in addition to reading the entire topic. So that was three reads for some topics.

The other was the Yandex bot, and it was even worse when it came to doing unnecessary operations to get data from a topic. It did everything Slurp did, plus reading some topics in multiple views and looking at the user profile of whoever made a post that was new since its last visit. Yandex is supposed to search Russian-language sites. I have a few pages with some Russian on them, but it shouldn't be enough to attract Yandex.

I've updated the robots.txt file to deny those bots access to the entire Crazy Meds site.

Not much else was happening at the time. Google's bot was well-behaved. Actual human users weren't doing much at all.

If one or the other was doing its thing when we had few-to-no actual people on the site it probably wouldn't have been a problem. But when one has two badly-coded bots on at the same time, sometimes reading the same topics simultaneously, hilarity ensues.

The Yanga bot was also doing some stuff that seemed unnecessary, but it wasn't going through every topic like the other two. If I have any more trouble with a search bot I'm just giving in and giving Google exclusive access to Crazy Meds. Google is the Microsoft of the early 21st century as it is, so why fight it.