bugs Simtropolis 9.0.x - Bugs & Issues Report Thread

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

2 hours ago, hugues aroux said:

For more than 6 hours,

Grrr.

There has been excessive bot activity today targeting ST so CB tossed in some extra security measures early this morning before dashing out for the day going to another city. It might very well be related to that.  

Feel free to curse at it in the meantime. 

[simmering 2,629]

4 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Grrr.

There has been excessive bot activity today targeting ST so CB tossed in some extra security measures early this morning before dashing out for the day going to another city. It might very well be related to that.  

Feel free to curse at it in the meantime. 

I guess that would also explain the issues I had with logging in earlier. They were only temporary so if you want my view, keep the bots out and the security up.

[TheTimvh1 873]

May also explain the temporary prevention of liking or reacting to content I was having earlier as well.  Funny enough I actually put in a bug report about it, and it resolved itself before anyone could even comment on it, lol.😅

[CaptCity 4,705]

Kind of wondering why STEX bot is downloading all the files so many times...

Maybe it's not what I thought it was. It used to be the first downloader (usually), but never repeated.  

 

[memo 1,440]

It looks like those are failed download attempts. The download requests were blocked by Simtropolis servers with HTTP error code 429. It seems to be fixed now, though.

 

A different bug I've observed:

When I open any topic from the "All Activity" page, for example using a link such as https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/68528-simtropolis-90x-bugs-issues-report-thread/?do=findComment&comment=1808701, I get stuck indefinitely on a Cloudflare loading page.

If I remove the URL query behind the ?, i.e. https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/68528-simtropolis-90x-bugs-issues-report-thread/, loading the page is possible.

[CaptCity 4,705]

6 hours ago, memo said:

It looks like those are failed download attempts. The download requests were blocked by Simtropolis servers with HTTP error code 429. It seems to be fixed now, though.

Yes, it does. Don't see anything else dated after about 9/26/2025 7:40 AM PDT (my time)...

[simmering 2,629]

Not sure if anybody else has the same experience, but loading images to view on the black overlay (like the ones attached to STEX listings) takes unusually long. I do not believe that it is my connection since everything else works fine.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

5 minutes ago, simmering said:

...loading images to view on the black overlay (like the ones attached to STEX listings) takes unusually long.

I've just checked as me in FF and as a guest in Chrome with less than a second delay per pic.

I wonder it the background site backup might be causing intermittent delays. Is it all hours of the day and every time you check?

[CaptCity 4,705]

1 hour ago, simmering said:

...anybody else has the same experience, but loading images to view...

Yes, I've had this (or maybe something related happening for a little over a week, now). With me, it affects all areas of the site but not all images (weird). I have waited a bit to see if they appear with no luck. Refreshing hasn't had any affect, but sometimes restarting the browser (Edge) does.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

10 minutes ago, CaptCity said:

Yes, I've had this ...

Oh! The other thing to check is the number of Guests on the site when you experience the slowdown. That's been an ongoing battle which CB is still working on. A typical number of legitimate guests ranges from 50 to 100 at most. We've seen it as high as 675 recently and they do come in waves rather than constant all the time.

[simmering 2,629]

7 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've just checked as me in FF and as a guest in Chrome with less than a second delay per pic.

I wonder it the background site backup might be causing intermittent delays. Is it all hours of the day and every time you check?

Now that you mentioned it, it happens only from time to time.

6 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Oh! The other thing to check is the number of Guests on the site when you experience the slowdown. That's been an ongoing battle which CB is still working on. A typical number of legitimate guests ranges from 50 to 100 at most. We've seen it as high as 675 recently and they do come in waves rather than constant all the time.

That might explain it. I will check that first in the furture.

[nos.17 5,112]

So, this is an interesting one. I've been seeing a problem for the last two weeks or so where ST will fail to load most images on a page in Firefox 143.0.4. It looks like this below. Note banner, profile pics, trixies, and images in posts are all not loading.

The page will behave like this for a few days/up to a week after which it will fix itself automatically. Interestingly, if I log into a different browser (Edge 41.0.3537.71) everything works fine! I think this started after the extra protections with Cloudflare were enabled. Am I being rate limited in some way? Two things make me wonder:

1. It seems to be originally triggered (and retriggered after it fixed itself the first time) after running scripts to batch download a few dozen STEX items at a time for sc4pac.
2. I cleared the cache and all data in Firefox. Logging in to ST in Firefox now fails as the captcha is reporting I'm rate limited or a network error. It prevents me from clicking the checkbox.

Edit: uh oh. Now it's happening on Edge too.

  Edited October 18, 2025 by nos.17  

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

On 10/18/2025 at 2:59 PM, nos.17 said:

I've been seeing a problem

CB had a chance to take a peek under the hood and believes he's found the root cause in one of the Cloudflare rules. It was a bit too broad and ambitious and you were collateral damage.  

He did some code surgery and that should fix if for you. Let us know how it goes.  

[nos.17 5,112]

On 10/19/2025 at 8:01 PM, CorinaMarie said:

CB had a chance to take a peek under the hood and believes he's found the root cause in one of the Cloudflare rules. It was a bit too broad and ambitious and you were collateral damage.  

He did some code surgery and that should fix if for you. Let us know how it goes.  

Send him my thanks - images seem to work now! I still can't log in with Firefox as the captcha is still failing, but at least I have Edge to fall back to. Good ol Edge. 

[nos.17 5,112]

On 10/20/2025 at 8:14 PM, nos.17 said:

captcha is still failing

I was finally able to track this down, and it was due to an errant extension I had left enabled in Firefox, CORS Everywhere. Disabling this fixed the captcha, and also one other site I was having some troubles with. 

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

3 minutes ago, nos.17 said:

it was due to an errant extension

PEBKAC  

[nos.17 5,112]

6 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

PEBKAC  

Logging back in to ST

[TheMurderousCricket 5,049]

"Edit city journal" and "custom sidebar" text boxes in City Journal section are still out of operation, not showing text editing field. 

Standard solutions like refreshing or clearing browser cache do not seem to work.

[Haljackey 17,291]

Well seems we're mostly back after the site was put up for sale 

Kudos to site staff for addressing the problem rather quickly- especially since you're not being paid to be on call

 

Noticed a few minor things like some awards and avatars not showing, but I'm sure that will get patched up in time

 

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

4 minutes ago, Haljackey said:

Noticed a few minor things like some awards and avatars not showing, but I'm sure that will get patched up in time

It's likely DNS and maybe Cloudflare related so we expect it to fix itself soon(ish).

CB cleared the CF cache and it might take a wee bit longer to update for everyone.

[TheTimvh1 873]

So what exactly happened???  Did simtropolis get hacked???

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

2 minutes ago, TheTimvh1 said:

So what exactly happened???  Did simtropolis get hacked???

No, no. Just that once a year the domain name needs renewed and Dirk forgot. All is well. No worries.

[PlanetOfHats 506]

10 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

No, no. Just that once a year the domain name needs renewed and Dirk forgot. All is well. No worries.

And here I thought it was something more sinister. Something more... Vu, perhaps?

 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,049]

2 hours ago, PlanetOfHats said:

And here I thought it was something more sinister. Something more... Vu, perhaps?

I never encountered this "U-drive it" mission. Do I enter a special code or do something in game in a strictly predetermined and time-sensitive fashion to trigger it?

[TheTimvh1 873]

6 hours ago, PlanetOfHats said:

And here I thought it was something more sinister. Something more... Vu, perhaps?

 

Of course that whole expired domain thingy was the doing of Dr. Vu!🤣

[TheTimvh1 873]

On 03/12/2025 at 2:28 PM, PlanetOfHats said:

And here I thought it was something more sinister. Something more... Vu, perhaps?

 

Btw, I hope you don't mind me having used this for a joke on the simtropolis discord?

[simmering 2,629]

Hi guys, is the total of SC4 files on STEX correct? If I sum up all subcategories I get over 24,000 files.

[CorinaMarie 29,593]

12 minutes ago, simmering said:

If I sum up all subcategories I get over 24,000 files.

Do you mean sum up everything? Like your pic plus SimPeg (PLEX) and Skylines and 2013 and all?

When I add up from your pic I get 22,364 which is only 3 off (which might account for hidden files counted in the total).

[simmering 2,629]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Do you mean sum up everything? Like your pic plus SimPeg (PLEX) and Skylines and 2013 and all?

When I add up from your pic I get 22,364 which is only 3 off (which might account for hidden files counted in the total).

You are right, my mistake. When I copied the list I somehow got the numbers before the labels and then the 216 3ds Models turned into 2163 ds Models. Sorry for the confusion.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,049]

Is there any way to prevent the site from opening imgur (or other hosting site) when an image hosted there is clicked upon?

I ask this with regards to the city journaling. When clicked, images usually pop up in an extra window upon which users can click on them again in order to zoom them in. However, if a picture is hosted outside of Simtropolis, the standard zoom-in does not work and user is sent to external site instead (with the image still compressed, duh).

I'd sure be happy to avoid this, so that it's possible to view and inspect pictures within the site's limits. Is there any useful "magic" or coding that I can use while embedding or would that require making changes to the way our site as such works?