TinyCat Slowness and Bot Traffic

In the last week or so we have experienced an exponential spike in traffic on our site from bots trying to harvest book data, such as series, tags, titles, etc. Your Admin data (including patron information) is not anywhere public, and therefore is inaccessible to these bots. They are only trying to search public book pages.

While we are well equipped to defend against such attacks, the sheer volume of them this time is putting a rather unprecedented weight on our servers. This is in turn causing some slowness and may be staggering access at points. @ccatalfo and @conceptDawg are doing their best to defend against them and are experimenting with ways to allow some necessary searching (from Google etc.), but it's proving tricky. We will find the solution, but it is a new and challenging issue.

We are continuing our focus on preventing the slowness this has caused, and expect to resolve the entire issue within the week. Some slowness is expected over the weekend and early next week. If you are completely blocked from accessing any part of your TinyCat, that is not expected and you should please reach out to me here or at tinycat@librarything.com asap so we can get you back in.

Our front-line defense against this sort of thing is a tool called CloudFlare. If you see any CloudFlare pages while accessing your TinyCat library, that's just our defense system, so no need for alarm.

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience. I know how frustrating a slow catalog can be. Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you while we work on this, and thank you in advance for your patience.

ZephCraven:

Thanks for the explanation of what is going on. I will keep trying to access TinyCat and see what happens.

Update: I can now access TinyCat.

Thanks for this explanation/update. It is indeed frustrating, but I really appreciate to work you all put into this site & service.

Thanks so much! I've been getting a 500 Internal Server Error, is that to be expected?

>4 bmorebrooks: We're experiencing a severe spike from the bots again this morning — not to be expected, but we are aware of it! Thank you for posting, and sorry for the slowness and errors this morning.

So now I'm blocked from the site entirely. The message I get says to send an email to administrator. This is very frustrating as it happened in the middle of a class. Please advise.

>6 bmorebrooks: So sorry for the trouble! Please email me your IP address at tinycat@librarything.com (you can find your IP address here: https://www.whatismyip.com/). We'll unblock you asap. Sorry that it confused you for a bot! Thanks for your patience.

We cannot currently access our circulation in TinyCat and have also encountered the site being blocked. Is there additional information on the current status of TinyCat?

>8 ORPARClibrary: Hi there, please email me your IP address so we can unblock you!

>9 ZephCraven: looks like we eventually got in after restarting and it taking some time. but thank you!

>11 ORPARClibrary: I'm glad to hear that, so sorry for the trouble!

Our school library is experiencing the same issue -- all attempts to access the catalog, even as an admin, are blocked with the following message:

Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

What can I do to resolve this?
You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Cloudflare Ray ID: 9973ad7d1d63d69b

I also emailed about this, as we have students trying to check out books every day.

>13 bcslibrarypa: Sorry about this, we are investigating why this is showing up for you now and will report back.

>13 bcslibrarypa: Can you please try once again accessing your Tinycat? We've adjusted our whitelist to hopefully allow through.

The staff member who reported the problem to me is able to get through but I am still not? I sent an email to tinycat@librarything.com and posted in your blog

>15 ccatalfo: BCS Library was able to access TinyCat. Thanks so much!

>16 LeadFoundation: We may need to also get your IP to allow through, we'll check on that.

>17 bcslibrarypa: Glad to hear that, sorry for the trouble.

I am about to clear history but as this occurs in multiple locations I doubt it will help. I have the cloud flare thing as well.. this was intermittent yesterday and still here.

Please advise.

It's the message as documented above. Here's the IP 50.206.176.156

and the cloudfare ray 997b6f257a33c342 (that seems to increment)

>19 RWVLibraries: >20 RWVLibraries: Ok please try again.

>16 LeadFoundation: Please try again as well.

weird but true .... now all works...

>22 ccatalfo: I and my co-worker are still blocked from librarycat.org. Is there a way to unblock for our organization? This is a real problem.

Our staff is not always in the office so I think the IP address would vary.

>25 LeadFoundation: Hi there! So sorry about that. Please post here or email me at tinycat@librarything.com with any and all IP addresses that are seeing a blocked message. Everyone who is blocked can find their IP address here: https://www.whatismyip.com/. Once we have those IP addresses we'll be able to add all of you to a whitelist.

Apologies again for the trouble and thank you for your patience!

We appear to have DHCP Enabled.

We have our entire staff using the TinyCat library system. This is not a viable solution to be constantly reporting our IP addresses, especially if they change.

>28 LeadFoundation: Thanks for letting me know! I just replied to Shawna's email with some updates, feel free to email me if you have any questions about that. Thanks again for your patience.

Thank you for your help! Things are working well now.