Site Feedback/Questions

I have a way to temporarily bring the site back online when it goes down, but that's dealing with the symptoms rather than the problem. The problem is that TONS of spambots are accessing the site without any sort of pattern to them, so there's no obvious way to block them since their IPs are all over the place. That's why the site keeps periodically going down still.

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Originally Posted by Boss-Hog

I have a way to temporarily bring the site back online when it goes down, but that's dealing with the symptoms rather than the problem. The problem is that TONS of spambots are accessing the site without any sort of pattern to them, so there's no obvious way to block them since their IPs are all over the place. That's why the site keeps periodically going down still.

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Probably something you've already considered but can you geoblock? I own sites that are fairly local/regional in targeting and just ended up blocking all traffic that wasn't from the US or Canada. I know RedsZone has non-US posters so maybe exceptions could be carved out or something, but I'd consider it if you haven't already.

It is taking quite a while to post and reply.

Maybe go two factor for authentication.

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Originally Posted by Roy Tucker

Maybe go two factor for authentication.

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That's a really good suggestion. The version of vB we're running is quite old, so it doesn't support it, but I'll look to see if a more recent version of it does.

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Originally Posted by Redsfaithful

Probably something you've already considered but can you geoblock? I own sites that are fairly local/regional in targeting and just ended up blocking all traffic that wasn't from the US or Canada. I know RedsZone has non-US posters so maybe exceptions could be carved out or something, but I'd consider it if you haven't already.

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We can do this, and it's my understanding the spambots are coming from IPs all over the place. It may be prudent to see if we can restrict it to U.S. and Canadian IP addresses plus any other countries where RedsZoners live. I'll bring this up to our host, so if anyone lives outside the U.S. or Canada, please let me know (here is fine) to ensure we whitelist that country if we implement this. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Originally Posted by Boss-Hog

That's a really good suggestion. The version of vB we're running is quite old, so it doesn't support it, but I'll look to see if a more recent version of it does.

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Unfortunately, it looks like it's only available for administrator and moderator functions and not to use the site as a whole. That's too bad because that would've taken care of a lot of the issue.

Still moving quite slow, but I know you're working on it.

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Originally Posted by GAC

Still moving quite slow, but I know you're working on it.

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We are and it's painfully slow for me, too. Thanks again for everyone's patience.

Thanks for all you do Boss. I would miss this community if it was gone.

I'm alarmed at how... alarmed I am when this site doesn't load. That slight twinge of withdrawal.

Now, what do I do with that information? What does anyone do with any information -- you stuff it down deep inside and keep an eye on it.

Things are much smoother over the last hour or so

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Originally Posted by Boss-Hog

We are and it's painfully slow for me, too. Thanks again for everyone's patience.

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Do you have a list of what you want to have? Specs, costs? I could ask around, I work with a LOT of nerds

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Originally Posted by westofyou

Do you have a list of what you want to have? Specs, costs? I could ask around, I work with a LOT of nerds

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Assuming it's not all fixed for the moment (it's finally working well, but I've not heard from the host that they did anything to address it), let me look into what we have, and I'll let you know. Thanks for offering.

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Originally Posted by Boss-Hog

We can do this, and it's my understanding the spambots are coming from IPs all over the place. It may be prudent to see if we can restrict it to U.S. and Canadian IP addresses plus any other countries where RedsZoners live. I'll bring this up to our host, so if anyone lives outside the U.S. or Canada, please let me know (here is fine) to ensure we whitelist that country if we implement this. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Had the thought also that you might want to see how hard the AI scraper/crawlers are hitting the site and update the robots.txt. A lot of these companies aren't as "polite" as companies like Google have been in the past about crawling and will just relentlessly hit sites. They're already stealing content so probably not a surprise they aren't always respecting bandwidth.