Attn: Forum admin (Dean?)

[Jeremy Schiffer]

For the past several weeks at least, when I try to visit this forum, it takes no less than a minute for the page to show up. Also, everything I try to do (browse a topic, post, anything) takes a similar amount of time. It's as if something is clogging the system up. Then I noticed this:

There are a LOT of "users". Obviously nearly none of them are actual people. Just curious if there are so many crawlers and bots that it is slowing the forum down to a crawl? Dunno what else it could be, this is the only site giving me this issue. Anyway, just dropping this here in case it helps.

[Kerry Fullington]

Same here.

Jeremy, Dean is Thermwood's Chief Financial Officer, Probably not working on the forum anymore.

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Ugh. I've been so swamped for the past couple years, I have fallen out of the loop here. I only just recently found out that Jim Bullis isn't with Thermwood anymore.

But, nice to have confirmation that I'm not the only one experiencing a SUPER slow forum.

[Clint Buechlein]

Ah shoot, I wonder if someone accidently hit the toggle for 56K forum instead of DSL?

I brought it up to the guy who handles the forum here a little while back, I think he said something about what we are doing right now is holding off the bots, despite what we see at the bottom for non users browsing. I'll plug him again when he returns from his overseas trip. Hopefully before I go overseas.

-Clint-

[Kerry Fullington]

Hey Jeremy, Here is what Google Gemini had to say about it.

That rumor sounds like a classic case of tech-support Chinese whispers! It mixes up a real web infrastructure problem with some deeply outdated internet terminology.

The short answer is **no, they didn't literally plug the forum into an old 56K dial-up telephone line.**

Here is what is actually going on behind that rumor, breaking down what the words mean and how a real bot attack causes that exact "56K speed" feeling.

---

### 1. The Bot Problem (The Real Cause)

The Thermwood eCabinet Systems user forum has been dealing with a massive influx of automated malicious bots and web crawlers. These bots create hundreds or thousands of fake user profiles and relentlessly scrape the site for data.

When thousands of bots slam a website at the same time, they consume all of the server's processing power (CPU and memory). Because the server is entirely overwhelmed trying to answer the bots, legitimate users trying to load a page are put at the back of a massive digital line. The page takes ages to open, making it *feel* like you are using old internet tech.

### 2. De-bunking the "56K from DSL" Rumor

To understand why the rumor is technically impossible, we have to look at the terminology:

* **56K:** This refers to 56 Kilobits per second—the speed of standard **dial-up internet** over regular telephone lines from the late 1990s.
* **DSL:** Digital Subscriber Line, a high-speed broadband connection that replaced dial-up.

A website's server is hosted in a modern data center with massive commercial fiber-optic connections (thousands of times faster than DSL). Website administrators cannot just "switch" a modern server over to a 56K dial-up line to combat bots. If they did, the bots would still break the site instantly, and no human would ever be able to log in again.

### 3. What the Admins *Actually* Do (Where the rumor started)

When web administrators try to "combat bots," they use a technique called **Rate Limiting** or **Throttling**.

Instead of letting a computer look at 100 forum pages per second, the server artificially restricts the speed of suspicious traffic. If a connection looks like a bot, the server intentionally slows their data delivery down to an absolute crawl—ironically, down to about the speed of an old **56K modem**—to force the bot to give up and leave.

### Summary

The forum is running slowly because it is actively being clogged by an overwhelming number of bots, not because Thermwood downgraded their office internet. If an admin is applying anti-bot measures, they might be throttling traffic, but the extreme slowness you are seeing is the result of the server buckling under the weight of those fake accounts.

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Ah shoot, I wonder if someone accidently hit the toggle for 56K forum instead of DSL?

I brought it up to the guy who handles the forum here a little while back, I think he said something about what we are doing right now is holding off the bots, despite what we see at the bottom for non users browsing. I'll plug him again when he returns from his overseas trip. Hopefully before I go overseas.

-Clint-

Wait... you mean there is something better than 56k available these days? Man, I *am* out of the loop. Maybe I should call my internet provider... (on my rotary phone)

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Hey Jeremy, Here is what Google Gemini had to say about it.

That rumor sounds like a classic case of tech-support Chinese whispers! It mixes up a real web infrastructure problem with some deeply outdated internet terminology.

The short answer is **no, they didn't literally plug the forum into an old 56K dial-up telephone line.**

Here is what is actually going on behind that rumor, breaking down what the words mean and how a real bot attack causes that exact "56K speed" feeling.

---

### 1. The Bot Problem (The Real Cause)

The Thermwood eCabinet Systems user forum has been dealing with a massive influx of automated malicious bots and web crawlers. These bots create hundreds or thousands of fake user profiles and relentlessly scrape the site for data.

When thousands of bots slam a website at the same time, they consume all of the server's processing power (CPU and memory). Because the server is entirely overwhelmed trying to answer the bots, legitimate users trying to load a page are put at the back of a massive digital line. The page takes ages to open, making it *feel* like you are using old internet tech.

### 2. De-bunking the "56K from DSL" Rumor

To understand why the rumor is technically impossible, we have to look at the terminology:

* **56K:** This refers to 56 Kilobits per second—the speed of standard **dial-up internet** over regular telephone lines from the late 1990s.
* **DSL:** Digital Subscriber Line, a high-speed broadband connection that replaced dial-up.

A website's server is hosted in a modern data center with massive commercial fiber-optic connections (thousands of times faster than DSL). Website administrators cannot just "switch" a modern server over to a 56K dial-up line to combat bots. If they did, the bots would still break the site instantly, and no human would ever be able to log in again.

### 3. What the Admins *Actually* Do (Where the rumor started)

When web administrators try to "combat bots," they use a technique called **Rate Limiting** or **Throttling**.

Instead of letting a computer look at 100 forum pages per second, the server artificially restricts the speed of suspicious traffic. If a connection looks like a bot, the server intentionally slows their data delivery down to an absolute crawl—ironically, down to about the speed of an old **56K modem**—to force the bot to give up and leave.

### Summary

The forum is running slowly because it is actively being clogged by an overwhelming number of bots, not because Thermwood downgraded their office internet. If an admin is applying anti-bot measures, they might be throttling traffic, but the extreme slowness you are seeing is the result of the server buckling under the weight of those fake accounts.

Now you've started something, Kerry. I just *had* to do my own "research", and asked Grok. Here is its reply...lmao

It's a pretty classic forum-mod response: casual, a bit jokey, and vaguely reassuring without committing to anything immediate.
Breakdown of what Clint is actually saying:

The 56K vs DSL joke: He's acknowledging that the forum feels painfully slow (like 1990s dial-up). It's self-deprecating humor to show they're aware of the problem.
The real explanation: They have some kind of anti-bot measures turned on that are deliberately making the forum slower for everyone. He mentions "what we are doing right now is holding off the bots" — this probably means things like:
Aggressive rate limiting
Heavy JavaScript challenges / bot detection scripts
Cloudflare-style protections (or similar) that add latency
Some toggle that throttles performance to make scraping harder
The "despite what we see at the bottom for non users browsing" suggests their analytics show low bot activity, but they're still running the defensive measures anyway (classic "better safe than sorry" admin mindset).
The timeline: The actual tech guy is overseas, so nothing is getting fixed soon. Clint will poke him again, but he's also about to travel. Translation: expect this to stay slow for at least a couple more weeks.

My overall take:
It's a friendly but slightly hand-wavy response. They know it's bad, they're blaming bots (which is often legitimate — forums get absolutely hammered), but the fix is stuck in "wait for the one guy who knows the system" territory. This is extremely common on smaller/independent forums that run on older software (phpBB, vBulletin, XenForo, etc.).
Honest verdict: The slowness is probably real and annoying, but it's not total incompetence — it's the cost of running a forum in 2026 when bots and scrapers are relentless. Still, "we'll fix it when the forum guy gets back from vacation" isn't the most confidence-inspiring timeline.
If the forum is important to you, you could politely reply something like:
"Haha, yeah it's feeling pretty 56K lately. Any chance we could get a lighter mode for registered users, or is the bot situation that bad right now?"
That keeps it light while gently pushing for a better solution.

[Clint Buechlein]

I gotta say, I feel personally attacked by Grok. It seems to see right through my customer service tactics that rarely fail me

-Clint-

[Kerry Fullington]

I still remember the original eCabinet systems forum and we all thought the phpBB software was quite an upgrade and I think that was Dean.

[Kerry Fullington]

This might be a good time for Thermwood to decide if they want to host a "User Forum" or abandon it.
Having a forum that is not functional and for all practical purposes, ignored, is basically the same as not having one.

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Yeah, this will be my last post until it is working again, too painful to wait 1-2 minutes after clicking anything for the forum to respond.

[Kerry Fullington]

There's one "Bot" down.

[Jeremy Schiffer]

Hey! It's working again!