For the last couple of weeks malicious bots have been hammering the ISFDB server almost non-stop, which made it effectively unavailable except when the bots took brief breaks.
On top of that, earlier today we learned that the PHP programming language, which is used by the ISFDB Wiki as well as by millions of other Web sites, has a crucial vulnerability. We have taken the site down and will be working on patching PHP. It won't address the bot problem, but at least it will address the security issue.
This post will be updated once PHP is patched.
2026-10-23, 5:30pm update. The PHP vulnerabilities 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.
11 comments:
Thanks for keeping everyone in the loop. I hope you can get back online soon.
We are working on it, but it's one of those things where the released emergency patch requires certain components to be upgraded first and then you find out that those components have other prerequisites and so on and so forth. With luck it won't take too long...
Thanks for sharing, I was wondering about the cause. ISFDB is a valuable resource, keep up the good work.
Looking forward to the site being available again. I use it multiple times a week. Thanks for providing it!
Why is https://isfdb.stoecker.eu working? It was down, too, but this morning after trying regular ISFDB several times I randomly tried Stoecker again and now it works. PS: This is Username leaving this message. Hopefully the fact that I'm not logged in on that site is because it requires a separate login and when regular ISFDB is finally back up I won't have to login to that again. The vast majority of the pending edits (I think it was nearly 1,500 before the site went down) are by me so it would be good for mods to be able to approve again.
Now suddenly Stoecker is down again. What a mess. Even when these people finally get this PHP thing patched the bots will probably still be there. I anticipate my Halloween-related edits still being unapproved long after Halloween is over. Hard to care anymore.
It took 2 tries to get the most recent post published; the 1st time it gave me an error. So even this site doesn't seem to be working properly.
If edits are made to the stoecker site merged with the main DB?
The weekly ISFDB backups can be used to create a separate copy of the ISFDB database for testing (or any other) purposes. https://isfdb.stoecker.eu is one such database. Anything added to it will not affect the main database in any way.
Hope you will manage to fix quickly the problem. Good luck !
BAD BOTS! Thanks for the update! Hope you are successful in your fixes.
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