Current website status - search problems, captchas etc..

Hello guys, 

lots of you reporting on the forum and in PMs that something is broken.

First of all, we are aware of the problems and they are actively being solved.

What we know/what I can share:

In past few months, Numista activity surged a lot and on top of that, we were affected by some malicious bots as well.
Bots were stopped by actions taken by devs, but non-malicious activity kept surging and while I am not sure what caused latest problems, site/database began experiencing very high traffic. High traffic and activation of harsher bot rules due to high traffic is what causes you to see captchas/time outs and database errors.

Developers began implementing better search that takes less resources/and is faster for several search fields. This proven unsufficient though, and decicion was made to fasten up and move main text search field into this new search.

This move needed full database reindex - this is what caused many search problems and was responsible for momentarilly missing items. As far as I know, all items should be reindexed already.

Known problems:
- Search by several fields is not working at the moment

- Captchas are still very numerous (which is probably because of still high traffic)

Thanks for looking into it, I was wondering why I get this message, now I know!

New info:

Some bots were blocked, this should make high traffic situation a bit better in short term.

In next few days, migration to a better search should be complete, resulting in end of search errors, and also less traffic (due to database being able to handle more)

Thanks jarcek for taking the time to acknowledge the issue and communicate on the plan. Best of luck to the team!

I am getting a capcha a day and having to tick a box, very annoying and quite insulting give my time spent here.

Sometimes that's what has to happen in order to protect the site. It isn't just this site: I am a moderator on a firearms website and they are having the same issue with bot traffic bringing it to a crawl.

Another bit of an issue which isn't noted here is that when you click on a country to view items under the country, there are a bunch of items out of order when it comes to chronology and monetary system.  Not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things, but it's out of whack at the moment.  Good to know why all the captchas are popping up.

Thanks for your work on this,

Quipu

Adding coins to catalogue is lugubrious too, long delays as it finds countries on list (Get rid of all the silly ancient ones/ statelets in India and Germany and place them in a separate list).

I have to refresh every 30 minutes and capchas every day.

Captchas area layered “defense”. If everyone is getting them, it means that server is overloading and captchas are there to slow everyone down, protecting the website from crashing.

Are the bots you're dealing with, those who steal all our catalogue?

https://fr.numista.com/forum/topic168566.html

I do not know, but would presume yes. Problem is that with AI, anyone can basically start such bot easily.

Hello,
Here is an update on the various topics mentioned above:

• The server that powers Numista was very busy over the past few days. The high traffic is caused mainly by real users (more or less double compared to last year), although there are always bots (mainly search engines, but also a few undesirable bots).
• The annoying captchas you saw recently are triggered when the server is overloaded in order to reduce the traffic more broadly than with the usual firewall rules.
• There are indeed regularly new bots which try to copy the full catalogue. We regularly adjust our firewall rules to fight them, but we can't block them 100%.
• A solution was finally found this morning, which solved the overload issue. We are still closely monitoring.
• In parallel, a development has been ongoing for a few weeks to change the technical layer that runs the search engine. The goal is to make the search faster, reduce the load on the database, and open the door to some improvements. We accelerated the development in the past few days so that we can reduce the server load more quickly. And we just released the main part.

Thanks guys, much appreciated!

It is a free website, so I think most of us will be very understanding when there are technical problems from the outside.

Would what you posted here be the reason why when I search using the Numista number it says that there is no item with that number?  I know the number exists because I entered it into my collection.  Thank you for any clarification.

I haven't had any problems when searching for an N number. What is the number?

One number I just tried was Numista #466059.  Thanks for looking into this.

It worked for me.

Try again.

Thanks, sometimes I forget this is free and bots and bad actors are overtime now. I mean I am being bombed by American car insurance spam emails at the moment for no reason. According to AI, its a major problem at the moment. Called Lead gen spam.

No capchas this morning was good.

There was an issue with searching by N# number, which is now fixed.

Just lost another whole submission. After submitting, a captcha came up and the submission was not recorded in my requests. Very frustrating!

Hello, when searching by date and value, the website does not respond and when manually searching for the country, not all coins in the catalog are displayed, but only some.

I can confirm that the issue is back again.

And it should be resolved now.

The issue with empty search when looking for specific reference is back…

Sorry for that. The search by reference is fixed.

Hi everyone,

I don't know if that's related to the issues above, but the pictures in the Comments section of every coin page are no longer visible (I just can see the thumbnail on the phone)

Olá!!!
Estou tendo problemas ao pesquisar moedas no site, ao digitar país, valor e data, a pesquisa retorna com aviso de inexistência do ítem.
Se realizar a pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, funciona. Porém, com vários ítens pela falta de um 3° filtro.
Isto já acontece a vários dias, até o momento. 

I'm still having trouble searching by two parameters. You can either search by date or coin value. Both simply don't work.

@nicolo.magnani Some images in the comments have been temporarily unavailable, for a reason unrelated to the discussion above. They should all be back.

@Iki Cendron and @jeto2, could you please provide a link or a screenshot showing the issue?

Images not displaying, from here:

50 000 Đồng - Vietnam – Numista

Xavier

@nicolo.magnani Some images in the comments have been temporarily unavailable, for a reason unrelated to the discussion above. They should all be back.

 

@Iki Cendron and @jeto2, could you please provide a link or a screenshot showing the issue?

 

It's working so far today.

And also the images on the coin page are not showing in the description: N#3869

I forgot the picture:

The 2 Liard coin page is trying to load this image:

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/images/miniatures/67059206df348.jpg

Opening the image directly says the image isn't found.

(I would have posted this in a new thread as I'm not sure it's the same issue as was reported previously.)

The comments picture issue seems to be happening on others too…

N#45 

I just want to add a big thank you to Xavier and team, for tackling the problems head-on.

I have been in similar situations and I know it sucks.

Highly appreciative of all the work you all put in to resolve the issues, and wishing you a speedy return to more boring times 😉

DuikerTS

I just want to add a big thank you to Xavier and team, for tackling the problems head-on.

 

I have been in similar situations and I know it sucks.

 

Highly appreciative of all the work you all put in to resolve the issues, and wishing you a speedy return to more boring times 😉

I agree

DuikerTS

I just want to add a big thank you to Xavier and team, for tackling the problems head-on.

 

I have been in similar situations and I know it sucks.

 

Highly appreciative of all the work you all put in to resolve the issues, and wishing you a speedy return to more boring times 😉

True, thank you numista team for doing a great job solving this! 

Olá!!!
Pesquisa realizada com 3 filtros. Não apresenta resultado. Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada.   
 

Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada. 

I've also been noticing a lot of broken thumbnails and links for photos depicting varieties. Some examples:

N#1105

N#1214

N#3152

I very much appreciate the work being done to keep this site running. I'm part of the problem, having joined recently, but have been impressed by the amount of knowledge collected on this site!

Iki Cendron

Olá!!!
Pesquisa realizada com 3 filtros. Não apresenta resultado. Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada.   
 

 

Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada. 

This belongs in a separate post since it isn't the same behavior as the other problem in this post.

Try your search again. This search works for me:

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/index.php?e=iraq&r=&st=147&cat=y&im1=&im2=&ru=&ie=&no=&v=250+Fils&cu=&a=&dg=1970&i=&b=&m=&f=&t=&t2=&w=&mt=&u=&g=&c=&wi=&sw=

(Next time please include links to your searches as well as images. That will often make it easier to figure out what the issue is.)

Not sure if this is part of the same issue…

When I click on the comments box the screen goes white/pale.  No magnification available.

LDC63

Not sure if this is part of the same issue…

When I click on the comments box the screen goes white/pale.  No magnification available.

That’s what I posted about as well, pictures in comments don’t currently seem to work.

same here

I have actually found the site running well since Friday. No more capchas or slow loadings, so obviously problems have been fixed  thank you Numista team!

Note, captchas are also a defence which block some bots by requiring a user level action.

I occasionally get the captcha when I first load the mumista site. I have never had one when logged in.

Apologies - Capchas/slow loading (definition please)?  Not sure if this is linked to my reported systems error.  The ‘Comments’ pictures simply do not load no matter how long you wait.

Please vote on https://en.numista.com/forum/topic175894.html

LDC63

The ‘Comments’ pictures simply do not load no matter how long you wait.

Example:

N#58347

Numista lost the pictures and 2 of the 3 thumbnails. Here's the links to the pictures:

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/images/606c5f624b83a.jpg

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/images/606c5f743c3d5.jpg

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/images/606c64c49bd7b.jpg

That gives a page not found error.

I think there is a generic fault with the database: somewhere the pointers to the objects have been lost or changed. 

The problem is widespread

odd job

That gives a page not found error.

I think there is a generic fault with the database: somewhere the pointers to the objects have been lost or changed. 

The problem is widespread

 

Yes exactly, that's why I said Numista lost the pictures.

Hello,

Sorry the issue with pictures in the comment section appeared again. It's fixed now.

Iki Cendron

Olá!!!
Pesquisa realizada com 3 filtros. Não apresenta resultado. Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada.   
 

 

Mas, a mesma pesquisa com apenas 2 filtros, aparece a moeda pesquisada. 

Thank you. There is indeed an issue with the search by face value. We'll look into it.