Question for the Admins

[W1RKW]

Steve, John, Todd,
Hate to put you on the spot but since no one has asked the question, do you realize that AMFone.net forum gets an Error 500 sporadically and periodically?  Your logins to AMfone appear as if you may not be aware of the intermittent up/down time. Could be wrong but just wanted to float the question.

BTW, today was a good day.

[w3jn]

Yes.

No idea what the issue is but I suspect it's related to bots skimming forums to feed AI.  Other forums have been hit.  Again, not sure 100% this is the issue.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Yes.

No idea what the issue is but I suspect it's related to bots skimming forums to feed AI.  Other forums have been hit.  Again, not sure 100% this is the issue.

Personally John, it's hard to believe that bots are causing the problem. "error 500" generally are issues more commonly found between the specific web site and the host server. Has anyone approached the hoisting company that runs and supports the servers to notify them of the amfone.net problem?

Given the very erratic nature of the web site for the last several months, down during most days when people are up and around, versus up and running fairly normal during the late evening hours. AND, with variations of this schedule almost every day. Us diehards generally pop in almost every day, but I suspect many are or will be frustrated and pissed off and move on somewhere else for their "AM fill". But there is no other totally AM-related web site that has the depth and breadth that we have here.

Amfone.net has provided many years of almost totally related "AM" dialog between the members both domestically and internationally. It would be a real shame for it to slip deep into the shadows of oblivion.

[W1RKW]

Thanks for the feedback, John.  

I don't know if this observed behavior is a clue or not but just as the site went down this last time, I was lucky enough to be there when it happened. the site became intermittently accessible then became inaccessible (blank browser screen) followed shortly by the Error 500.  This happened in the span of 10 or so minutes.

[Sam KS2AM]

Yes.
No idea what the issue is but I suspect it's related to bots skimming forums to feed AI.  Other forums have been hit.  Again, not sure 100% this is the issue.

Personally John, it's hard to believe that bots are causing the problem. "error 500" generally are issues more commonly found between the specific web site and the host server. Has anyone approached the hoisting company that runs and supports the servers to notify them of the amfone.net problem?
Given the very erratic nature of the web site for the last several months, down during most days when people are up and around, versus up and running fairly normal during the late evening hours. AND, with variations of this schedule almost every day. Us diehards generally pop in almost every day, but I suspect many are or will be frustrated and pissed off and move on somewhere else for their "AM fill".

Right. I believe that the "bots" have always been here indexing data and are represented by "Guests" e.g. as I type this there are "171 Guests", and 1 User (me) that are connected.  There is just not that much data to index on this site and if they were causing a problem the outages would be sporadic and not what I have seen which has been for the last three months, the website magically awakens for a few hours around 11 PM US Eastern and any activity outside of that time just appears to be a fluke since the site is usually dead while most people are awake.

My assumption was always that 1) The $ that I and others donate are used to fund the hosting service, whatever that might look like.  And 2) When something is failing, we'll all be notified that there is an issue, kept up to date about what is being done about it and an incident will be opened with the organization(s) that are being paid to support the infrastructure/applications. The issue gets addressed and we're back in business.  It looks like that was a bad assumption.  I've been doing some version of Tier III IT support since the 1980s and this is how this works everywhere - it's pretty basic.

The elephant in the room is that there are serious problems with the site including the outages that have been going on since the summer, and we are all still in the dark.

From my previous post:
Most of the activity on the forums seems to be from US amateurs and given the aging population that means most board members are already in bed at that time or close to it.  All of this serves to discourage board use and that is evidenced by only a couple of users being online when the web site is actually up, as well as the lack of activity over the last couple of months. It's a downward spiral.
The web page mentions that it is "Powered by SMF 1.1" which appears to be a 20-year-old piece of software that is no longer supported i.e. no bug fixes, no security fixes and it "Requires the latest version of Adobe Flash Player"   There is also a reference to the mkportal.it website which is currently promoting Italian dental implants.  
All of this is bad news and would tend to convince the casual observer that this website is, for all intents and purposes ... DEAD.  
  

[KD6VXI]

For gits and shingles I did a traceroute from work to the site during an outage.

The server is still up and answering requests.


Tracing route to amfone.net [74.208.236.51]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.180.3.50

  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.124.76.130

  3     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.124.76.135

  4    50 ms    50 ms    49 ms  10.123.245.254

  5    65 ms     *        *     74.125.251.128

  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.

  7    77 ms     *        *     lo-0.bb-b.ud.mkc.us.net.ionos.com [74.208.1.13]

  8    76 ms     *        *     lo-0.rc-b.ud.mkc.us.net.ionos.com [74.208.1.12]

  9    77 ms     *        *     lo-0.rc-b.slr.lxa.us.net.ionos.com [74.208.1.9]

10    76 ms     *        *     lo-0.gw-distd-sh-1.slr.lxa.us.net.ionos.com [74.208.1.46]

11    76 ms    76 ms    76 ms  74-208-236-51.elastic-ssl.ui-r.com [74.208.236.51]

 

Trace complete.

This lends credence to it being on purpose.  I didnt see anything g at the web host that pointed to anything specific.

--Shane
WP2ASS/ ex KD6VXI

[W1RKW]

Might be onto something with a bot issue.

There are 3105 registered members and the most users online was 2773 in Jan 7, 2025 (see General Statistics below).  This number doesn't differentiate between Guest and Logged in Users.  Guests were predominate. I and another user were logged in. At the time there were 197 Guests and 2 members looking at AMFone. The Guest Stat captures the previous 15 minutes of the present time.

The Most Users Online stat has been in the 1 to nearly 3 thousand range for all of 2025. Prior to 2025 these numbers were lower in 2024
this same stat was even lower in 2023, in the lower hundreds and was basically flat or consistent in years prior.

Some registered members have not logged in many years.  Some members are SK and some are simply registered drive-bys or lurkers or who have posted minimally only to fade away.  

Out of curiosity, I took a sample from 7 pages of the 104  pages of the membership, about a 6% sample (sample shown below).  Each page of the member list displays up to 30 registered members per page.  I looked at those who registered but never logged in after registering which totaled to 38. This averages to 5.4 per page of the 104 pages. Call it 5 per page.  This extrapolates to 520 registered/non-actives/never logged in.  Subtract that from 3105 registered members and you get 2585 registered "active" members.

This does not include the roughly 90% (anecdotal) of those whose last activity was prior to 2024 where they logged in after registering but have 0 posts (logged-in lurkers). If this were included the "active" member total would be less. The site went down before I could collect some of that data.

While gathering the data the sight went down. I had multiple pages open including the main page. I kept refreshing the main page and while doing that observed the Guest stat increasing and decreasing on each refresh, some by 1 or 2 or as many as a dozen at any given time. Guests were looking at a variety of pages.  Many were the same pages and the variety varied from non-technical, technical, ForSale, Wanted and non-AM/radio subject matter, both recent and old posts.

Lastly, there was one other user logged in when the AMFone went down. I was hoping with my multiple pages open and the other logged in user, the site would remain up but it did not. It went Error 500 around 845AM this morning, Nov 21, 2025. Unlike the last time I witnessed AMFone going Error 500, there was no intermittent access prior to the error. The door was slammed shut this time.

There may be a bot issue causing denial of service as indicated by the Guest Stat behavior and Sam's observation but without actually seeing what IP addresses are accessing the Guest side of AMFone, who knows but it seems likely that isn't membership clogging the system.

What is accessible while the forum returns Error 500:
http://amfone.net/AMPX/67.html
http://amfone.net/Tech/wrl/king500.htm
http://amfone.net/ECSound/K1JJ16.htm
http://amfone.net/ecsound/RFsampler.htm
http://amfone.net/audio/
http://amfone.net/mkportal/modules/media/file/
Many others.
There's  probably a reason why these are accessible and the forum is not. They may not be readily visible on the net. Just a guess.

FWIW.


General Statistics from AMFone.net
   
Total Members:    3105
Total Posts:    279017
Total Topics:    27393
Total Categories:    6
Users Online:    246
Most Online:    2773 - January 07, 2025, 04:45:49 AM
Most Online Today:    269
Users Logged In Today:    12
      
Average registrations per day:    13.54
Average posts per day:    41.38
Average topics per day:    4.84
Total Boards:    36
Latest Member:    Kb0qpd
Average online per day:    140.77
Male to Female Ratio:    163

Page Sample of Registered members that never logged in after registering.
Page 1: 5
Page 8: 7
Page 11: 6
Page 28: 3
Page 59: 9
Page 86: 6
Page 92: 2

[Pete, WA2CWA]

YOU HAVE TOO MUCH TIME ON YOUR HANDS!

YOU NEED A HOBBY!

[W1RKW]

LOL. you're right. being retired does that.

[KD6VXI]

YOU HAVE TOO MUCH TIME ON YOUR HANDS!

YOU NEED A HOBBY!

We have one, trying to figure out why the site dies every day.  Zero transparency so this is what it is.

Why you mad bro?  Screaming in all caps?

Calm down Pete, its nothing personal.





Wonder if bots scraping the site are taking all the daily bandwidth allotment?

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI

[W1RKW]

you might be onto something, Shane.

like previous early mornings over 190 guests and 1 or 2 users logged in

turn off the guest viewing option and force log-ins.

[K8DI]

For the sake of keeping this site up for those who use/love it, perhaps an experiment where for a few days guest access is turned off, and new registrations are delayed (you can register today but you can?t access until tomorrow).  If the site stays up, a much more robust new registration process and simply no guest access might save us?

Ed