* Update: all of our sites should now be fully back to normal, it turns out it was an issue with our servers after all! It's frustrating how long this has taken to resolve, once again huge apologies to all of our regular readers and everyone who reads road.cc for the patchy experience over the past couple of weeks.*
You might have noticed that the website has been running a little on the slow side recently, and navigating between pages, especially when logged in with a road.cc account, has been particularly difficult. We’ve definitely noticed too, as it’s made working on the website pretty tricky and frustrating these last two weeks.
We’ve been experiencing a number of issues with the server over that time and the exact cause of them has been hard to pin down. The ChatGPT bot (and some others) hoovering up a fair bit of the server’s bandwidth certainly wasn’t helping, and we’ve blocked those, but the root cause of the slowness looks to be down at the database/application level and we’re still hunting for the fix. We haven’t released anything new to the site in the past few weeks, so the reason why the site has suddenly slowed is unclear.
What can you do?
The site currently works better if you’re logged out, because a lot of the time you’ll be seeing cached pages that aren’t directly from the affected server. Obviously you can’t comment if you’re not logged in, but you’ll probably find the site easier to navigate. Other than that, it’s mostly going to be a case of being patient with us. We're really sorry for the continued disruption and are confident the site will be back up to speed soon.
Thanks to HoarseMann for conjuring up the lead image, originally posted in the comments underneath the live blog on 21st September. This has been a hugely frustrating time for us, but you gave us a good chuckle!