No choice but to block all traffic coming from China

winstep · **Joined:** Thu Feb 26, 2004 8:30 pm **Posts:** 13118

nexter wrote:

it's perhaps a valuable lesson learnt.

Probably the same lesson many other Western brands learned when they decided to tackle China. And to tell you the truth I wasn't even expecting much, but something as bad as this I did not think it was possible either.

Anyway, it did push me to add all those Nexus Ultimate/Winstep Xtreme promo prompts/dialogs to the free version of Nexus.... Hopefully those will have *some* effect (and hopefully will not backfire either).

Indirectly it also gave me an incentive to re-organize and improve the product pages on the Winstep website.

nexter · **Posted:** Tue Jun 02, 2026 1:41 am

winstep wrote:

nexter wrote:

it's perhaps a valuable lesson learnt.

Probably the same lesson many other Western brands learned when they decided to tackle China. And to tell you the truth I wasn't even expecting much, but something as bad as this I did not think it was possible either.

Anyway, it did push me to add all those Nexus Ultimate/Winstep Xtreme promo prompts/dialogs to the free version of Nexus.... Hopefully those will have *some* effect (and hopefully will not backfire either).

Indirectly it also gave me an incentive to re-organize and improve the product pages on the Winstep website.

Well, at least somethings - hopefully - positive came out of it then.

nexter · **Posted:** Sat Jun 13, 2026 3:30 am

How come we still seem to be getting a fair lot of 'Guest logins temporarily limited...' messages - sometimes for quite a while Jorge - and over 1,000 guests? It's becoming a bit of a PITA to be frank.

winstep · **Joined:** Thu Feb 26, 2004 8:30 pm **Posts:** 13118

nexter wrote:

How come we still seem to be getting a fair lot of 'Guest logins temporarily limited...' messages - sometimes for quite a while Jorge - and over 1,000 guests? It's becoming a bit of a PITA to be frank.

Nothing to do with the China block.

Just press F5, normally the issue clears itself quickly.

Previously the Guest limit was much higher which meant registered forum users would almost never see the warning, but a new breed of bots were able to max out the CPU on the server with a much smaller number of Guests. I tried increasing the limit once and that only resulted in even more bots "arriving".

At the moment this is the best I can do without getting into CDN and CloudFlare territory - and then you get the equally annoying "verifying you are human" thingy, so...

Fun fact: now that China is blocked at the firewall level, registrations from the Chinese reseller have increased in quantity. Go figure. :roll:

nexter · **Posted:** Mon Jun 15, 2026 5:34 am

winstep wrote:

nexter wrote:

How come we still seem to be getting a fair lot of 'Guest logins temporarily limited...' messages - sometimes for quite a while Jorge - and over 1,000 guests? It's becoming a bit of a PITA to be frank.

Nothing to do with the China block.

Just press F5, normally the issue clears itself quickly.

Previously the Guest limit was much higher which meant registered forum users would almost never see the warning, but a new breed of bots were able to max out the CPU on the server with a much smaller number of Guests. I tried increasing the limit once and that only resulted in even more bots "arriving".

Bugger. Well, nothing to be done, alas.

winstep wrote:

At the moment this is the best I can do without getting into CDN and CloudFlare territory - and then you get the equally annoying "verifying you are human" thingy, so...

Ugh, let's not go there if possible.

winstep wrote:

Fun fact: now that China is blocked at the firewall level, registrations from the Chinese reseller have increased in quantity. Go figure. :roll:

How queer. Bears watching I guess. If it keeps up, then fine.

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No choice but to block all traffic coming from China