Friday, October 23, 2026

2026-10-23: ISFDB server is back up as of 5:30pm EDT

The PHP vulnerabilities which necessitated taking the server down on 2026-10-21 were patched by Al over the last 48 hours and the server is now back up. Many thanks to Al for his hard work! 

P.S. Please note that this fix doesn't address the issue with malicious bots that have been hounding us recently. That's a whole different can of worms.  

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome! It's working for me this morning.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, response time seems much quicker than before the update.

Ahasuerus said...

Response times are much better because the malicious bots that have been harassing us for months are currently taking a break. Unfortunately, we still don't have a way to block them permanently, so things may degrade again if and when they come back for another round.

Anonymous said...

They're back for another round. Signed, Username

Anonymous said...

The site has gone down again.

Ahasuerus said...

Strictly speaking, the software has been patched and the site is up and running. However, the implemented software patch only addressed the security vulnerability that up to 70% of Web sites worldwide had. It didn't address the issue with malicious bots that have been hounding us recently, which is a different can of worms. The bots are back as of this morning, which means that the site is trying to handle hundreds of concurrent requests for data. It causes regular user requests to time out.