Getting Error message on opening Cadtutor.

[BIGAL]

This has started to appear hit "Try gain" and works. Using Edge. Other Forums Bricscad, Acad are Ok.

 

[SLW210]

I've been getting those randomly as well at home on Firefox and work on Edge.

[VicoWang]

I often encounter 500 errors here as well. I've always thought it was a necessary test for the upgrade to version 5, so I refresh it several times, and it can be refreshed successfully.

[Steven P]

From another forum earlier - they have a 'too many requests' page appearing - a side effect of an anti- Al screening thing to stop the bots a little

[Paul Li]

usually after I click Try Again then it'll work..not sure why..

[Steven P]

Answer from another forum which is a bit more than my answer above - the errors are a kind of firewall to stop the Al bots scraping the websites, taking all the bandwidth, slowing things for the humans - something we'll have to live with for a while I think

[Dadgad]

Yeah, me too...sounds like the NEW and annoying "normal" .  

[BIGAL]

Something maybe Dave can look at is my Norton antivirus pops up now and then with a warning about "I.see.you" has been detected. Will attach an image next time.

[SLW210]

11 hours ago, BIGAL said:

Something maybe Dave can look at is my Norton antivirus pops up now and then with a warning about "I.see.you" has been detected. Will attach an image next time.

 

That sounds like a fake Norton Pop-Up, ISeeYou, used to be (is?) an older vulnerability for web cams, I guy was activating webcams without the activation light on and blackmailing women with photos, he was caught and arrested a while back. I'll look for the article.

 

Here is the Wiki

 

iSeeYou - Wikipedia

 

This looks to be a good while back.

[CADTutor]

Hello friends, I have noticed the same intermittent errors. As some have suggested, this seems to be to do with AI bot activity which floods available resources, making it difficult to serve pages to real users. I am hoping this will subside over time, once all models have gorged themselves on our content. Right now we have two choices. We can either add a Capture test that means you need to complete an action before getting access to the forum (this basically filters out the bots) or we just put up with random errors for now. Let me know what you think.

[VicoWang]

To be honest, the greatest value of CADTUTOR is its vast stock of knowledge and records, which are opened to search engines. I don't know if blocking AI would also block the legitimate crawling of search engines, just like the Cloudflare verification added to Theswamp, making it a ghost website (hidden from search engines, known to those who know but not searchable by those who don't, of course, this strategy should have reduced corresponding cost expenditures).

 

Perhaps a certain threshold should be set: for example, under the condition of ensuring that normal user access is not blocked, setting a limit on the total number of daily visits by AI or search engines combined, while allowing access for those with accounts.

[CADTutor]

The only real control we have is to block by IP address. I did that for a while, some months ago, to prevent a swamp of bots using an IP address in Singapore, but it turns out these were originating in China and using Singapore as a spoof address. All they needed to do was use an alternate spoof IP address to get around it, so I gave up on that strategy.

 

I'm hoping that this activity is temporary rather than a new normal.

[CADTutor]

53 minutes ago, VicoWang said:

To be honest, the greatest value of CADTUTOR is its vast stock of knowledge and records, which are opened to search engines. I don't know if blocking AI would also block the legitimate crawling of search engines, just like the Cloudflare verification added to Theswamp, making it a ghost website (hidden from search engines, known to those who know but not searchable by those who don't, of course, this strategy should have reduced corresponding cost expenditures).

 

Yes, you are correct. The AI bots do not declare themselves like search engine bots do, they remain anonymous, so it's not possible to target only AI bots. Blocking all bots effectively destroys a site's SEO and search indexing. So my approach (at the moment) is to ride out the storm and see if it eases in the future.

[CADTutor]

Just looking at the stats this month (September 2026) I can see that after the US (which always tops the charts) the next five biggest IP locations for visitors were Ireland, Armenia, Seychelles, Angola, and Unknown. You can be pretty certain that they are all spoof IP addresses used by scraping bots and those 5 account for almost half the bandwidth this month.

[Dadgad]

If it doesn't kill us, it makes us stronger...and older!

Growing old beats the hell out of the only other option.     

[VicoWang]

I’m not sure whether CADTUTOR is currently using Cloudflare’s proxy-based DNS resolution. However, if it is already using Cloudflare and still behaves this way, it seems they don’t have any better options at the moment.

 

Accordingly, when developing my VedaCAD.com system, I fully considered and leveraged Cloudflare’s edge caching technology—complete with built-in free DDoS protection—to enhance performance under high concurrent access.