Currently our club’s beloved ipernity website varies in accessibility. You may notice times with basically no access, times with very slow loading times and other times when it works quickly. There doesn’t appear to be any regular pattern to these disruptions.

As noted before, these overloads are caused by excessive requests accessing our servers. These may be from the new AI bots that since March 2025 now have software that requires less machine power and thus easier to be used by spam type bots.

We continue to search for a solution to our server overload issue. The following is what we’ve done and what we are researching:

1) Additional servers have been added to reduce the load on each individual server. These extra servers are sometimes turned off when the load is too high for any member to access the website anyway. This helps keep the cost of the extra servers down.

2) Specific IP addresses from known abusers have been blocked.

3) Limits to the number of concurrent connections allowed have been put in place.

4) We are on our third engagement of a Firewall. There are adjustments that can be made to Firewalls, and different setups continue to be tried.

5) Currently we have two potential support individuals.

6) We are looking into adding a Captcha (extra verifying step) at the front page. We aren't sure how much effort this may take, and also not sure if it would help.

7) We are reaching out to multiple IT companies, trying to find one that might replace the help we used to get from InnovationsOn which no longer exists. These companies often don't respond, or only work with large companies. But we continue to search.

The internet is always changing, and so while we need immediate support, we will undoubtedly need support for something else in the future. Our volunteers, Rob, Ralph and Stefan are able to handle a lot of issues, but the future may well bring things that once again need outside support.

So if you want to help us find potential individuals, or a company to support us, we have a short write up of our current situation and our basic IT setup that can be shared. The first person you talk to might not be able to help, but they may know of someone else to try. Please contact the team via team@ipernity.com to receive the document.

Please understand that bots (the most likely cause of our issue) are not going away. We are working to find an ongoing solution that will mitigate their effect on our website.

Thank you all for your patience, understanding and any help you may be able to give.

Maintaining your club membership even while the site isn’t working as desired is essential to us continuing as a club and to maintaining our website. Thank you for renewing and donating when you can.

- your ima team