I can get to the main page here:
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/

But if I click on any forums or try to login I click on I get a page that says:

Cookies
The requested action requires that cookies are enabled. The Lazarus team

(Tested with recent versions of both Firefox and Chrome on Linux)

Maybe see here
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,72223.msg564968.html#msg564968

I tested myself. My laptop (linux / older fedora / older firefox) and my desktop (win 10, Firefox uptodate), they both work.

But I tested in one of my Linux VM (older firefox), and got the error. Switching off "tracking  protection" solved it. Switching it back on, and it still works... So probably some cookie that needs to be allowed once, and that somehow stays (not sure how long)

Had the same today with Edge on Win11.
When I unchecked the "Stay logged in" checkbox I could login.

I have the same issue. I am not currently logged in, but all attempts to do so, or access any board produces the same Cookies error.

I have added exceptions for cookies and tracking on Firefox to no avail. Also tried other browsers, Hv3, Chromium, Tor. Its broken with every one.

How wierd!

Tried again just now, and its working just fine!

and now its broken again.

There does seem to be an ongoing problem, affecting multiple users, and independent of the browser being used (or browser settings).

Cookies are definitely enabled here.

Peter B wrote

Tried again just now, and its working just fine!

You probably did something that caused a cookie to be created. But the forum is still broken for the general use case (i.e. any new visitors with default browser settings, probably search engine crawlers, etc). Try this:

1) Open a new private/incognito window
2) Go to the forum home page: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/
3) Click any forum link

The issue might be caused by a recent change to the forum software version or configuration settings.

 
I confirm, the links does not open, only the main page. Although logged in, I can read and reply.

n7800 via fpc-pascal wrote on 10/9/25 2:00 am:

The first few link attempts give me the enable cookies message, after those few attempts all connections are then refused. Anti bot run amok?

Yes. Last week bots made the forum unusable. Since they (till now) don't use cookies, I redirect all requests without cookies to the use cookies page. When you try this 5 times within 10 minutes, your IP is blocked for one hour.

Marc

Marc Weustink wrote

,snip> , I redirect all requests without cookies to the use cookies page. When you try this 5 times within 10 minutes, your IP is blocked for one hour.

Something else must be going on then.
I have one cookie form lazarus-ide.org
and have only made three attempts this morning,
but are still blocked (seeing the cookie page I posted earlier)

Regards,
Peter

Marc Weustink wrote

Hi, make sure there is no PHPSESSIONID in the url you use to access the forum

Thanks, that works.
If I copy the link to an editor, and remove the
PHPSESSIONID part, and then paste back to the browser, I can get back in, at least for a while.

I did something like this yesterday,
but then got blocked again later.

Cheers,
Peter

But it does though!

I accessed a few pages on the forum,
and within a minute got URls like

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/board,61.0.html?PHPSESSID=27p38ov1l2p0qethl2nq560hr3

which direct me to the cookies warning.

Regards,
Peter

P.S.

Suggest keep the discussion on list as others
probably affected the same way.

Maybe that happened because I hit the browser "back" button!

Forum seems OK now.

Cheers,
Peter

Our list fpc-other would be IMHO more appropriate to this discussion than the fpc-pascal list... Personally, I'll post my observation there, and I suggest anybody interested in discussing that topic - rather than simply reporting that the forum doesn't work, or that the problem is solved - to subscribe to that list.

Tomas
(one of FPC mailing list moderators)

Moving thread to:
Please remove fpc-pascal and post replies to fpc-other only.

Marc Weustink wrote

Yes. Last week bots made the forum unusable. Since they (till now) don't use cookies, I redirect all requests without cookies to the use cookies page. When you try this 5 times within 10 minutes, your IP is blocked for one hour.

Mitigation is needed, but should it block or hinder users, visitors, and non-abusive web crawlers (legitimate search indexers and LLMs data gathering)?

A CDN / reverse web proxy is a common solution for scaling performance and blocking abuse and DoS attacks. For example:

https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/cdn/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/expanding-our-support-for-oss-projects-with-project-alexandria/ https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/project-alexandria/