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You may have noticed some changes to the navigation menu in the bottom-left of the site — apologies if it's caused any confusion. After consulting with people who have more design expertise than I do, it's clear we need an approach that better serves the 600–1,000 new visitors we receive each day. The insight is that newcomers don't browse based on how content is organized on the server; they think in terms of actions — things they want to do. With that in mind, the current menu (which may have already evolved by the time you read this) is built around verbs rather than nouns like "Articles, Forums, Gallery, Videos," and is designed to encourage exploration.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sold on it myself — but that's likely because I think about the site in terms of its underlying structure, which is second nature to me by now. If you're a longtime member who remembers the old static homepage, the About page will feel much more familiar. You'll find it linked at the bottom of every page, alongside the usual Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and similar links — the standard spot for that kind of thing.

As always, suggestions are welcome. The best exercise I can offer: try to forget everything you know about the site and visit it as if it's your first time. With roughly a thousand new visitors a day compared to around 20 regulars, that first-time experience is the one we most need to get right.

Hey everyone — if you've noticed the site running slower than usual over the past little while, we wanted to take a moment to explain what's been going on and where things stand.

We've been getting hit by bots. Automated crawlers and scrapers have been hammering the server in waves, driving up load and slowing things down for real members trying to use the site. We've been monitoring it closely, tightening up our defenses, and applying blocks and challenges as we identify offenders — and things are currently back under control. You should be seeing normal speeds again.

That said, we want to be honest: this is unlikely to be a one-and-done fix. Bot operators are getting increasingly sophisticated. Many are now using AI to help them mimic legitimate browsing behavior, rotate through identities, and slip past the kinds of blocks that used to stop them cold. It's become a real arms race.

The best analogy we can think of is the old carnival game Whack-A-Mole — you smash one down, and another one pops up somewhere else a moment later. We'll keep swinging the mallet, but there may be occasional rough patches when a new wave gets through before we can identify and block it.

We appreciate your patience, and we appreciate you being here. If you ever notice the site crawling or behaving oddly, feel free to drop a note in this thread and we'll take a look.

Added a new Dashboard page that displays an overview of what's new on WoodCentral and hundreds of other woodworking-related sites. It's currently on the homepage and from a link in the bottom-left menu.

A server tweek was made to provide more consistent fast page loads.

Hi,

Digging into the CPU throttling on my account, and the data doesn't support the "high traffic/bots" explanation I was given. Want to flag it and get some specifics.

DirectAdmin resource usage: speed limit dropped 200%→10% at 20:00 on 7/31, immediately following a single fault in the 19:00-20:00 window (F=1). Once at 10%, faults climbed for hours (17, 26, 34/hr) despite average CPU usage staying under 4% throughout. Recovered after 23:00.

Ran top on the account mid-throttle: one php process at 8% CPU, rest idle, 95%+ idle overall. Host load average was ~18-20, but with 192 threads that's ~10% utilization — not a loaded box.

So neither my account nor the host shows sustained load. Looks more like: one transient spike → steep ceiling drop (200%→10%) → normal background activity is enough to keep tripping faults at the reduced ceiling → hard to ever get a clean window to reset.

I get the noisy-neighbor tradeoff on shared hosting and I'm not trying to argue my way out of legitimate limits. But if one brief fault is enough to lock an account into an effectively unrecoverable throttle state, that seems like it's not calibrated the way you'd want.

Is this stock LVE behavior or a NameCrane policy layer, and if the latter, is fine-tuning the threshold/cooldown/step-size an option?

Can you get me:

1. The actual LVE policy on the 200%→10% drop — single-fault trigger, or pattern-based?

2. Reset condition — time-based cooldown, or does it require a clean period at the reduced ceiling (which would explain the difficulty recovering)?

3. The specific process/request that tripped the original fault at 19:xx, so I can correlate against my own logs?

Happy to hop on a call if that's easier to sort through together: REDACTED

Thanks for your help,
Peter

Hello Peter,
Found it — your LVE was stuck throttled at 10% CPU (down from 200%) after a single fault. The lowered EP limit kept triggering more faults, so it never recovered on its own.
Reset it to your plan's actual limits: 200% CPU, 4GB RAM, EP 50, NPROC 200. Should be back to normal now.
--
Regards,
Technical Support

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