Videokarma servers swamped?
 

We've been having a number of periods over the last few days where Videokarma would only load a message to the effect of " servers too busy try again later" no matter which page you tried to visit. This lasted a few hours around noon today.

Is audiokarma having maintenance and everyone there trying to log in here or is something wrong with the server.... Inquiring minds wish to know.

I wonder if it's related to the two day outage AK had a couple of days ago ?

I ran into that the other day on spiritualforums.com (VBB)

Nothing but "Server too busy" messages.....

What exactly does that mean??

Something has changed. They won't take jpg attachments bigger than 600 x 900.

Ah man!!

I just bumped into that resolution limit....Super annoying, needs to go!

I just checked and it says 900x900 for JPG and JPEG (The others dont have limits set)

Now its telling me the file size for jpgs has to be less than 146.2 Kb.

I ran out of my space limit a long time ago. Now I just link to the photo on Flickr.

I need to do that too, but uploading to flickr via smartphone and using it is significantly clunkier than than PC and all my pics are now phone pics since my Nikon died.

I have the Flickr app on my Samsung Android phone. Now when I open the camera app and view a picture, one of the share options is Flickr. Only takes a few clicks.

For uploading picture I've been using https://postimages.org/ or https://imgbb.com/ for years now. You don't even need to have a account with either of them and there is photo resize options in the menu and once uploaded there's a forum hotlink code that you can just cut and paste into your post.

I re-sized my images using Paint that's within Win7 to 640x480 and I was able to post them.

Videokarma has been throwing a lot of server too busy messages again...

Yup I have been getting that alot lately on inthe00s.com and I mentioned the other day how we are getting them here also....

Boy last night was scary.. For several hours all I got was this message..... I emailed Dave and told him in case he didnt know.......


I noticed politicalchat.org was slow also........


Im glad things are ok now!!!

I love VK and politicalchat.org like crazy :)

How busy is "too busy"?

Yeah, a lot of times this message are displayed last days. "Server too busy".

DDoS attack.

It's still ongoing. Just got the message again. Yeesh.

Chinese and/ or Russian hackers.
We should cut these bastards off from the internet.

That would be a good thing!!

STILL an issue. All I get most of the time is "server is too busy" If it is kind enough to let me search... I hit a wall when trying to read the threads

If you can't get into VK, you might want to check out the CRT collective on FB. Mostly a bunch of gamers and enthusiasts and some technical people.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/444560212348840/

There is definitely an odd repeating pattern here, it has happened 3 days in a row now, same sequence of events, first at about 11-12 CST, the error "server is too busy" comes up constant, and won't clear no matter what you do for hours, then 5-6 hours later, 4-5 PM, things degrade to "database error" which will last until 1-2 am, then clear. :tears:

Then the entire thing starts over again at the exact time again the next day.
I highly expect it to do it again this Sunday.

so far, I have heard no word as to what is causing this. :tears::tears:

I started a thread here on AK.
https://audiokarma.org/forums/index....ashed.1091056/

Hi to all,

outages probably caused by a mix of DDS attacks & massive "Bot" data mining.
In the last few days, between times when the forums were accessible & outages, the user count hovered around 40 thousand.

Look at the forum Stats below, vintage TV may be popular but i seriously doubt that the quoted maximum user connections (guests) were 60 thousand on august 1st 2025.

Bots are probably counted as users...

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

I could understand it if this was a government or corporate website but this is a hobby/ enthusiast website. So what is the point???

There has to be a way to stop these attacks from taking the site down, and it do believe they are attacks, as they are happening on a predictable basis now. :thumbsdn: :tears:

Hi to all,
Hi Yamamaya42,

One method is to identify the country or continent from which attacks or massive requests are coming and forbid anything coming from that area.

Two Radio/TV British sites i used to visit now do this to protect themselves (and i can't access anymore).

As a side question, who is the web Admin for VideoKarma?
it used to be Kamakiri but that was eons ago.

If we knew who's running this site, we could get some answers about the What/When/Who/How causes these periodical malfunctions and what strategies will be implemented to counter the threats.

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

PS : from the EU, VK totally unreachable Sunday Aug 3rd 2025

Maybe some answers here:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/

I believe Grumpy is the site administrator. And if this persists it might be worth having a conversation with him.

I just got another server too busy message. All this weekend all I could get was server too busy or database error and mostly the latter.

If upgrading the forum software allows better tools to stop this nonsense and clears up the attachment issues then it's probably high time for an upgrade.

It's taken me 4 days to finally get through. One day I got to the main page and the site was being hammered by 22000 "guests". Right now it's about 15000.

I do hope this gets fixed, but the reality is it's gone on for quite a while and it's more likely they'll close this place rather than fix it. The lack of solutions and input from administration are big red flags that this place is nearing the end.

I'm sure they're on top of it. This is something that will have to be solved by their ISP provider.

I thought the same thing when audiokarma split away some years ago but to be honest I've not seen nearly as much activity here as before the split. What I do know is I've been a member since Jul 11, 2006 but let things go until I began to tackle my old Magnavox Astro Sonic combo and that's when I noticed my user name never followed so I had to rejoin under the videokarma banner.
Still the same software hosting the forums with the same image size limits. There isn't a camera or phone out there now that does anything below a few megs and this is one reason I've chosen to move my Magnavox posts elsewhere.

Personally I'd like to see this venue active again but on a newer server with security protocols, again I vote for verticalscope but that's biased being I'm on the administration team.

Hi to all,

i hope VK can be archived by some web preservation service or museum entity, there are more than 25 years of precious vintage TV info and it would be a shame if it disappeared forever.

Maybe the ETF, i don't know.
They have some personal web sites archived such as Pete D's CT-100 site, Peter Y's mechanical TV and Roger D's mechanical TV site.

host checker data :
https://hostingchecker.com/

"Who is" data about VK host :
https://uk.godaddy.com/whois/results...eokarma.org%2F

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

I sent 15 private messages to a moderator from January 24, 2024 to February 10, 2024 advising of the problem we are now experiencing was happening. I saw 600K (no exaggeration) views to a certain thread in about a week. The site would go down temporarily. I monitored that thread and every hour, 50K more views. This went on for weeks. The moderator said he was only a mod and couldn’t do anything about it and he did not know who ran the site.

So I started a thread “Attention Administrators” and so far silence. Your silence gives the impression you don’t care. Possibly the ADMISTRATORS can't do anything because possibly they don’t own the site, either way, NOT GOOD!

BTW, that tread has over *1 million views without commentary post activity!

*CORRECTION: over 11 million plus views, last post 12/28/2023.

I suggest members take a look at this information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin

We're not the only ones. Go here:
https://threatmap.checkpoint.com/
On the left is current DDoS activity.
Quite a bit of it and it updates quickly.

I dont see how they are doing this.... It only says 1193 Guests right now........

Another VBB site im on has over 10,000 guests and no slowdowns......

Look at the footer found on pages of this site:


If the entities listed on the footer are accurate, as best as I can tell, London based Jelsoft Enterprises LTD. was dissolved 6/18/2013 and sold to MH Sub 1, LLC d/b/a Internet Brands, a software company based in El Segundo, California. On 6/3/2014, Internet Brands was acquired by an American private equity, venture capital firm, Kolhberg Kravis Roberts based in NYC. vBulletin is a software package and the latest version is 6.1.1.

Based on Jerome’s post, the second link is broken, but my own search of “Whois” reveals the domain name “VideoKarma.org” will expire on August 13, 2025 if not already renewed.

In my last post where I reported about a certain forum thread; when I began monitoring that thread on January 24, 2024, it had about 90K views and the last post was on 12/28/2023. Today that same thread has over 11.4 million views and the last post continues to be on 12/28/2023.

Hi to all,
Hi E-type2, Marshall,

There is a thread about VideoKarma on ARF's TV forum.
https://antiqueradios.com/forums/vie...49878&start=40

Post#45, Aug 13th 2025 informs that the VK hosting rights have been renewed just days before expiration.

I find it disturbing and downright rude that Admins HERE offer no explanation, corrective action nor excuses for the mess of the last month and a half.

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France