Tasking Manager projects are loading slowly or completely unresponsive

[tomidire]

Describe the bug

When opening a project, the UI loads to the full world map view instead of the assigned task area. The task sometimes loads after a delay of several seconds, but frequently does not load at all without manual intervention (page refresh, re-locking the task, or closing and reopening Rapid). In some instances, users are unable to open the project entirely and receive an error.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to the Tasking Manager project page
2. At this step, some users see an error preventing the project from loading or it is loading slowly
3. Click on a task to lock/open it
4. Wait for the map editor to load
5. At this step, instead of the user seeing the task boundary, the user just sees the map default to a world view instead of the task area

Expected behavior
After locking a task, the map should immediately zoom to the assigned task area with task boundaries visible and the editor ready for mapping.

Screenshots

Desktop:
OS: Windows, macOS

[jake-low]

Thanks for reporting this. tasks.openstreetmap.us has been under attack by scrapers (who are collecting data for AI training) since about June 17. The bots are systematically downloading JSON data for every single project and task on the site, which is bringing the database server to its knees. I've deployed some new firewall rules and other bot mitigations, which appears to have helped for now, though I expect this respite to be temporary (the bot operators have found ways around similar countermeasures in the past). If this continues, we will consider more heavy-handed mitigations, like disabling third-party API access or using captchas or proof-of-work to distinguish legitimate users from bots.

Note: the same scrapers are currently also attacking several other projects we operate (fieldpapers.org, osmcha.org, and maproulette.org) so you may encounter issues with those websites too.

[tomidire]

Thanks @jake-low for the information. This issue is increasingly impacting our work unfortunately.