Perhaps, don't recommend the Ubuntu Discourse instance for MATE refugees

MATE Desktop
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@lah7, per ubuntu-mate.community/t/31342/43, I’d like to notify you of:

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Weekly Forum Summary
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Kind of an odd title.

I’ve been able to access the Ubuntu Discourse go by going directly to the site or using the link on the UM site.Most of the time there’s no issues but on occasion it will time out either way.This has been fairly consistent behavior with Ubuntu Discourse for as long as I can remember.

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https: // discourse.ubuntu.com https://discourse.ubuntu.com works.

$ wget discourse.ubuntu.com
--2026-05-09 14:59:43--  http://discourse.ubuntu.com/
Resolving discourse.ubuntu.com (discourse.ubuntu.com)... 162.213.35.19, 162.213.35.111, 162.213.35.18, ...
Connecting to discourse.ubuntu.com (discourse.ubuntu.com)|162.213.35.19|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 308 Permanent Redirect
Location: https://discourse.ubuntu.com [following]
--2026-05-09 14:59:43--  https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
Connecting to discourse.ubuntu.com (discourse.ubuntu.com)|162.213.35.19|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’

index.html                           [ <=>                                                      ]  18,37K   117KB/s    in 0,2s    

2026-05-09 14:59:44 (117 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [18813]
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Your forum Trust Level has been bumped as it was caught by the automated spam filter.

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@Norm24, that’s most of why the title is what it is. It’s not a well-operated Discourse instance, especially considering that Discourse themselves offer free hosting, if desired.

Supplanted

@ugnvs, not for me:

Failed to resolve 'discource.ubuntu.com' (Name or service not known)
Failed to connect: Connect error
                          [Files: 0  Bytes: 0  [0 B/s] Redirects: 0  Todo: 0  Errors: 0                                                                    ]
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That looks like DNS issue to me.

Update: this answer is irrelevant due to misspelled address. Ignore, please.

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@ugnvs, you misspelled it in your command, and I missed it too, when copying it… I shouldn’t have just presumed that they’d also have DNS issues at the same time. Unfortunately, the original problem persists, regardless:

1224×2700 291 KB

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Sorry, my bad! Link was wrong. Corrected.

wget command was correct.

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@ugnvs, do you mean that you’re able to access Ubuntu’s Discourse instance? If not, I’m also able to acquire a positive status code via wget. However, their server is unable to sustain the connection throughput that is required to load the webpage: I’ve managed to connect via firefox-nightly solely once, and even then, without CSS.

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Hi, @RokeJulianLockhart , @ugnvs … and everyone :slight_smile:

Interestingly enough, in the last 15 minutes or so, I wasn’t able to access “Ubuntu Discourse”" / “Ubuntu Community Hub”" using any “chromium” based web browser in my Ubuntu MATE 24.04 LTS (“Noble Numbat”) laptop (I tried using “Google Chrome”, “Brave”, “Opera”, “Microsoft Edge”) … but “Mozilla Firefox” worked without any issues!

Judging from the following discussion topic, there is definitely something going on:

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/i-can-no-longer-access-these-forums-via-wifi-only-via-mobile-data/81961

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I sent the below via email (not at canonical) to someone who is with canonical, hoping they can pass the details of my observations on.


{ Sent to:       ken at vandine.org }

Sorry, Ken,

I am aware of the DDOS attack, but I wanted to give some feedback to someone on the inside regarding the breakdown.

I am able to open the status page at

I am able to open a web page (without login) at

but that takes forever (likely DDOS issue).

If I click on the login which takes me to the UbuntuONE authentication platform, I get the page to enter credentials, it seems to verify and set the appropriate cookie, but then, when I click submit, it goes into “la la land”, and hangs at the “redirecting” page for some time before giving the following error page:

I know that I an authenticated, because if I go to the address for UbuntuONE directly, I get a page reporting my personal data, along with the following:

So, I think

  • there is an issue with the redirect mechanism itself, or
  • the DDOS traffic is truly overwhelming the site access to ubuntu.forums.org .

Thanks for hearing me out.

Eric Marceau

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Good find!! I tested a bit more:
Brave → no connect
Librewolf → no connect
Opera → no connect
Mullvad → no connect
Firefox → connect, but with a long delay
Netsurf → immediate connection without delay
Falcon → immediate connection without delay

It looks like they block privacy oriented browsers. It looks a lot like this:

Understandable but in my opinion the wrong pavlovian reaction.
This is bad news for privacy.
This could cost them a lot of community trust.
(by the way, no problems here whatsoever with cloudflare)

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I begin to suspect that we face consequences of (ongoing?) DDOS attack on Canonical. I mean that anti-DDOS measures may contain as GEO/providers networks as TCP & HTTP traffic signatures filtering. The latter well may include signatures being close to fingerprints of mentioned browsers. :thinking:

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Not quite:

Not having a canvas fingerprint gets you blocked.
Having any canvas fingerprint, even if it’s fake will not get you blocked

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Probably, I had to say ‘traffic pattern’. Look, DDOSing bots are unlikely to provide canvas fingerprints, is not it?

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OK here is some news:

Using librewolf, which did not connect, I created an exception on “resist fingerprinting” for “discourse.ubuntu.com” and lo and behold, i got a reasonably fast connect (faster than with firefox although slower than netsurf)

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At the moment they don’t. But if a browser like Camoufox can fake it, bots could do it too. It’s probably only a matter of time.

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Is there a custom string that could be entered for the “User Agent Switcher and Manager” plug-in for Firefox that would “fake it”?

Found this reference for what Camoufox does:


ADDENDUM (22:05 pm EST May 10 2026) …

I’ve tried the following User-Agent strings, without success:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.3.1 Safari/605.1.15

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/148.0.0.0

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/147.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

ADDENDUM (22:18 pm EST May 10 2026) …

If I visit the Launchpad site, then click on Login, I get an immediate response from the authenticator, presenting the login page.

Again, if I enter my credentials, then click “login”, I get an immediate response, presenting my chosen page. No delay or rejection due to “privacy” or anti-fingerprinting.

So this appears to be service-specific or host-specific.

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