What's the story with OLF?

[Randy Roberts]

Anyone know what's going on at the Official Luthier Forum?
For a couple weeks, now it times out anytime i've tried to access it.

[Bob Gramann]

The owner said he needed donations to keep it running. Apparently, he didn’t get enough. The website has disappeared.

This used to be a very active forum. It could be again if folks moved over here.

[Dave Rickard]

I started here when Deb was in charge, she did a great job. Now that the OLF is gone I’m back.
RIP OLF

[JC Whitney]

Welcome back. Charlie and company have done (and continue to do) a great job stepping up after Deb sailed off into the chocolate sunset.

[Chris Ide]

I started here and moved mostly to the OLF but continued to check in here on occasion. I was mostly a watcher, never felt I had enough knowledge to jump in. Hesh mentioned he had talked to Lance about taking it over but Lance wasn’t game. It will be a shame if it disappears, there was a wealth of knowledge in the archives and available from the members. Still hoping somehow it reappears

[Bryan Bear]

I'm sad to see it go. there was a lot of great info in the tutorial section.

Hopefully MIMF can absorb a good deal of that traffic!

[Jarno Verhoeven]

Hopefully MIMF can absorb a good deal of that traffic!

And hopefully a lot of the worthwhile information, but maybe that ship has sailed already.

[Matthew Lau]

I dunno. Hope to see MIMF more busy again.

I've been looking on TalkBass for my bass builds, and it has a TON of information and activity.

[Charlie Schultz]

We (the mods and I) have talked about getting or buying something from OLF. I'm told there are no archives there though.

I have noticed a slight increase in attempted non-spam registrations, but very few use their real names (and I'm not ready to give up that policy).

[Bob Gramann]

The real name policy is a good policy. Anonymity can be an inhibition remover. Thank you for keeping this forum alive.

[Carl Dickinson]

Is anzlf.com gone too? Hasn't loaded in a couple of days for me.

[Barry Daniels]

anzlf is running now. They said that Chinese AI bots were sucking data out of the forum which caused an extreme slow down. That’s getting crazy. Hope we can avoid that.

[Carl Dickinson]

Just tried Firefox and Chrome. anzlf still times out with a cloud source message

[JC Whitney]

“…That’s getting crazy. Hope we can avoid that.”

Chaski.org, a hobby machinist and model railroading site, ran into this issue - suddenly jumped from a handful of users online at any time to tens of thousands (literally) of bots swarming. They’ve had to institute a member login to even only view. A bit of a drag, but seems to have saved the day.

[Charlie Schultz]

We are certainly not immune to those problems. Our hosting service (Liquid Web) seems to be getting more proactive- the last several times (including yesterday) they have notified me of excessive resource usage. They wind up narrowing it down to some bots and/or IP ranges and then they block those bots/ranges and normal performance is restored. Keeping the hardware and software up-to-date helps there, but that is generally not free...

[Carl Dickinson]

OLF is back for now. anzlf still not loading for me.

[Matthew Lau]

Hey Charlie,

Thanks for stewarding MIMF.
FWIW< I appreciate the real name policy. I've found that on some forums, anonymous people tend to misbehave a lot more.

[Jarno Verhoeven]

+1

[Darrel Friesen]

OLF has been down for the last few days.