Log in problems

[floris v]

The last few days I have problems loading pages and even logging in. What's going on?

[Bidouille]

For the record: https://lists.apache.org/thread/ytj4trg ... 7v97w2vmtj
Not a lot of guest sessions so slowness maybe due to Wiki part

[floris v]

Thanks. That answers the question.

[Jan_J]

We still have problem on PL forum to see anything.
We see only blank page, and its source code is

Code: Select all

<?php
        if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && ('on' == $_SERVER['HTTPS'])) {
                $uri = 'https://';
        } else {
                $uri = 'http://';
        }
        $uri .= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
	preg_match('/\/(\w\w)\/?$/i', getcwd(), $matches);
	$lang = $matches[1];
        header('Location: '.$uri.'/'.$lang.'/forum');
        exit;
?>

By the way, the popularity of AI has completely killed the activity on our (PL) forum. I can't see it now, but writing from memory, our last question post was sent in October'25.

[floris v]

The Dutch forum section is as good as dead too.

[cwolan]

We still have problem on PL forum to see anything.
We see only blank page, and its source code is
(...)

I see it in case of   https://forum.openoffice.org/pl

On the other hand,   https://forum.openoffice.org/pl/forum/   seems to be working (slowly).

[Jan_J]

Both ulrs push dead pages as I showed above. I was able to login through the search service
search.php?search_id=newposts
that seemed to work. I suspect some misconfiguration of the server.

[cwolan]

Both ulrs push dead pages as I showed above. I was able to login through the search service (...)

In my case, the second address works. I have just managed to log in and log out.

[Hagar Delest]

I removed the solved tag on the topic. I have the same issue as Jan_J when accessing from home. But it works fine from my office.
Will try the trick with the search link (thanks for that). Bu tis is clearly detrimental. Many users may think the forum is definitively down.

Edit: Tried from home with another link than the landing page of the forum and it works fine indeed. Thanks for the tip!

[Bidouille]

We still have problem on PL forum to see anything.
We see only blank page, and its source code

Fixed since last sunday: https://lists.apache.org/thread/nwgjdwj ... z1kdb2v1qh

But delays are still occurring.

[Jan_J]

Today, after 3 days of continuous delay
* successful login (but slow)
* many timeouts during connection
* several `server not found` messages

[RoryOF]

The site(s) have been under continuous denial of service attacks for several months, the attack changing each time to counter the defensive measures.

Why such an attack one can only guess, but one starts to suspect a malicious and targetted motive.

[MrProgrammer]

We may be getting lots of connections from damned AI companies tryng to feed their models. My impression is that a great many websites are having similar difficulties with connection overload. Big companies can afford to deploy sophisticated countermeasures. Small websites like our forum are the ones most affected by AI greed.

[RoryOF]

One would hope that they had by now milked the site of all usable information and only needed to "top up".

[Bidouille]

A workaround to lighten the forum load would be to declare these bots through ACP.
So that they cannot download the attached files.

[RoryOF]

Just for information

https://ask.libreoffice.org/c/english/5

displayed this banner today:

"Due to extreme load, this is temporarily being shown to everyone as a logged out user would see it."

This is the first time I have seen such a message on that site.

Rory

[charlie.it]

By the way, the popularity of AI has completely killed the activity on our (PL) forum. I can't see it now, but writing from memory, our last question post was sent in October'25.

The Italian section of the forum has also been dead for some time.

[RoryOF]

If these sites are apparently "dead", perhaps they should be locked and a notice posted redirecting would-be posters to the en Forum (where all the fashionable people go!).

[Jan_J]

If these sites are apparently "dead", perhaps they should be locked and a notice posted redirecting would-be posters to the en Forum (where all the fashionable people go!).

Fortunately, not yet. En forum is widely available anyway.

[floris v]

The problem is, of course, that those forums exist only for people who don't master English, or they would come here right away. Such people should learn English, however. I noticed long ago that all people who answer questions on the Dutch forum, also post here. Apparently, there is a relation between being able to solve problems with office software and mastering English.

[MrProgrammer]

My browser, Safari, offers a built-in translation service. My system is configured for English, however I have enabled Spanish and French translations and dictionaries on my Mac. If I open the Spanish forum, I can more-or-less read the Spanish posts there since I probably know 5000 words in Spanish and a fair amount of the grammar. But viewing that web page, I can ask for Translate to English, and then the text is in English. I'm sure the translation isn't perfect, but it seems to be pretty good. Some posts will use words I haven't learned, and then the translation service is easier and faster than looking up those words in my dictionary. Perhaps some people using the Dutch forum have browsers which can offer them a Translate to English service when viewing the English forum. Then they can at least view topics and solutions. The Firefox browser also offers me translation services. When I opened the Spanish forum Firefox detected that the language was Spanish and asked me if I wanted to translate the page to English.

The browser's translator doesn't help if Dutch speakers need to ask a question in English, but there are online services for that. I find DeepL to be quite good.

[Bidouille]

Since the beginning of 2026, slowdowns and errors have driven end-users away from the NL forums.
If we add AI to search engines, we see a decline in traffic.

[floris v]

If these sites are apparently "dead", perhaps they should be locked and a notice posted redirecting would-be posters to the en Forum (where all the fashionable people go!).

Out of curiosity, I checked the Japanese section. Its admin hasn't posted for a long time, or so it seems, there are a few recent posts, and there are some clearly off topic discussions, though as far as I could make out, no blatant spam. Maybe somebody with some knowledge of Japanese could check it out and if necessary set it to read-only. Maybe that check should be done for all of the nl sections whose admins aren't active on the En forum.

[charlie.it]

By the way, the popularity of AI has completely killed the activity on our (PL) forum. I can't see it now, but writing from memory, our last question post was sent in October'25.

The Italian section of the forum has also been dead for some time.

I meant that there's a real shortage of users, both old and new. No new questions are coming in. So there's no point in redirecting to the EN forum.