I’m baaaack
Oh dear. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned in the Open Thread that today is the Ides of July.
When I was about to start writing, the blog went down. Nor was it the usual “too many requests” problem. This time the glitch was at the level of the host’s server, and it affected quite a few sites. I don’t know how many, but when I phoned the server the agent told me that a whole tranche of their hosted sites were down, and that it would probably take “a few hours” to fix the issue. It seems to have taken close to three hours.
This sort of thing is frustrating. But it happens now and then with all hosts, as far as I can tell. A while back I looked into changing hosts, and there seemed to be many problems reported for all of them. So I’ve stuck with mine, for better or for worse.
Apologies to everyone who was trying to access the site this afternoon. But at least it wasn’t that something was wrong with this particular blog.
Meanwhile, I used part of the down time to work on a document in Word, and discovered that a recent update there had generated a bunch of automatic things that I don’t want. For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of “help.” But to figure out how to turn it off was not the easiest thing, although I finally accomplished it.
Technical stuff; gotta love it.
“ For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of ‘help.’”
Do I *ever* sympathize with disliking *that* sort of [expletive]!
@neo: For instance, there were constant AI prompts trying to guess what I wanted to write next. I do not want that sort of “help.
Microsoft bet big and badly that users wanted “AI Everywhere” in Microsoft products.
No. We may like some AI under some conditions we choose, but I never want to deal with AI customized by a company I don’t trust like MS.
Even with ChatGPT I always ignore its offers to “help” me with writing.
huxley:
Fortunately I was able to get rid of it. It was highly annoying. It was prompting me every few words, adding a next word it thought I wanted. Autocomplete on steroids.
The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
When I was an estimator,by writing the numbers down myself sometimes I knew something wasn’t right, can’t do that with AI.
Technical stuff; gotta love it.
I am reminded of that Trotsky quote, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Whether we like it or not, we have to deal with the constant deluge of tech so-called innovations.
— huxley
It’s an old problem. For those of us who were not born yesterday, remember Clippy?
The reason the big tech companies are pushing LLMs and related tech so hard is not that they think it’ll be popular, per se. It’s that it’s all they have.
Silicon Valley et al love to blather on about innovation, but in fact technical innovation has slowed to a crawl for years now. The smartphone is 20 years old. The Apple Watch is years old and has never really been a huge thing. Google Glass? Remember that?
To build hype and excitement they need something new, or perceived as new. “AI” (it’s not really AI, that’s a marketing scam) is all they have to spin.
Neo, did you ask AI how to turn off the AI prompts?
= = = = = = = = =
A couple months ago I heard a professor on the radio saying that AI is in large part overhyped snake oil. I may search for more specifics of this. I know AI can do some things very well, but am concerned about possible damage caused by this marvel/toy. I’m also put off when the knee-jerk reaction to every question is “What does AI say?”
A friend of mine is concerned that he is becoming psychologically dependent on Claude.
Neo, I have used Claude AI a lot for my small blog … doing stuff like writing code for stuff and changing themes w/o damaging everything. I know you have worked hard to get it working right for you but you still have some issues you mention at times. Here’s what I just asked Claude and his response (NOTE: I am an AI Whisper – AI Whisperer Notes so most AIs work willingly with humble me) :
Me: Neo blog – https://thenewneo.com/ … a favorite of mine where I also comment on it. Neo, the lady who owns the blog has had it for decades, and is having troubles over the past few years with it being slow at times and even comments won’t go thru, or even people can’t login to it as it says something like “too many requests”. Also, when I go to the blog that “Recent Comments” sections needs to be reloaded to see the newer comments. Recent example is: I’m baaaack https://thenewneo.com/2026/07/15/im-baaaack-3/ —- any suggestions? My blog is much smaller and you helped me just switch themes to the free GeneratePress; however, hers has a large data base and she’s not sure what to do…
Claude AI: Alright, pulled up her “I’m baaaack” post — helps to see the actual symptoms she’s hitting. Here’s what’s likely going on and what she can try, roughly in order of effort:
The “too many requests” errors (login/comments) That’s almost certainly her host’s WAF or rate-limiter (or a security plugin like Wordfence) flagging normal traffic as abuse — very common on shared hosting once a site has real, sustained visitor volume. With decades of posts and thousands of comments (her Law category alone has ~2,950 posts, Uncategorized has 4,495), her site pulls a lot more DB queries per page load than a typical blog, which makes it look “suspicious” to rate limiters faster than it should. Have her ask her host support directly: “What’s triggering 429/too many requests errors on login and comment submission, and can that threshold be raised for my site?” That’s a 5-minute support ticket that often just fixes it.
Recent Comments needing a manual refresh This is a caching issue, not a bug. If she’s running any page cache (host-level or plugin), the sidebar gets baked into the cached HTML and won’t update until the cache clears or someone forces a refresh. Two fixes:
• Have the cache plugin purge automatically when a new comment posts (most modern caching plugins — LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket — have this built in, just needs the setting enabled).
• Or exclude that widget from the page cache entirely and let it load via a lightweight AJAX/fragment call instead.
Overall slowness with a large database Three things help, roughly cheapest-to-most-involved:
1. Clean the database — years of post revisions, spam/trash comments, and transients bloat the DB and slow every query. A plugin like WP-Optimize or Advanced Database Cleaner can trim this in one pass. This alone often makes a big, old blog noticeably snappier.
2. Object caching — if her host offers Redis or Memcached, turning it on takes a lot of repeated-query load off the database. (Funny enough, this is the thing Hostinger was nagging you to enable — for a site her size it’s actually worth it, not just an upsell.)
3. Re-evaluate the host — if she’s on a lower-tier shared plan, a site with her history and traffic may have simply outgrown it. Rate-limiting + slowness + occasional whole-server outages (like the one she described) are classic signs of being on oversold shared hosting. A managed WordPress host built for higher-traffic/older sites (SiteGround GrowBig or higher, Rocket.net, WP Engine, Kinsta) tends to handle this much better — proper server-side caching, no arbitrary request throttling on real users, better DB performance under load.
If you want, I can draft a short message you could send her (or she could send her host) laying out the “too many requests” question specifically — that’s the one most likely to get resolved fast without any migration headache.
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You may have already tried all that but thought I’d check with my Sidekick Claude in case…