Temporarily Closing the Board to Guests

[sodascouts]

The board has been sluggish lately, and when trying to figure out why, I realized that we had over 100,000 guests viewing. While I'm sure a portion of those were legitimate, since there hasn't been a big even in the fandom lately, I suspect a large number are spammers.

I'm temporarily closing the board to guests. What that means is that you'll need to log in when you get here in order to view the board. I don't plan on doing this long-term as I want this site to be an archive for everyone, but I hope it will deter this latest wave of spammers.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

[sodascouts]

So, I found out this measure was actually completely useless, so I’ll disengage soon. However, it turns out almost all of the bots are variants of the same IP, which smells very funny, so I’m keeping it closed a bit longer until I fix things through other more elaborate means. These are more time consuming, but I’ll get started on it today.

[WalshFan88]

Thanks for the update, Soda.

I too have noticed the lag in the board software. At the time of writing this there are 50,000 and some change active users according to the bottom of the forum homepage. There is definitely a bot farm IMO. What's interesting is the lack of spam posts but maybe they are going about it differently.. I almost wonder if it's like scrubbing the website for data or doing something else nefarious. Regardless, it's eating up a lot of bandwidth. It might make sense to ban every account with no posts and a recent join date if there is a way to filter it like that other than just looking for users in the same IP bracket. Sorry you have to deal with it.

[WalshFan88]

Hi Soda/Dreamer,

I noticed for awhile the board speed was quite fast after Soda first moved it to signing in to see the board and first it improved and recently it's back to being slow again and I'm seeing high numbers of active unregistered visitors/people viewing without an account every time I am here. I had some thoughts I was going to share on a possibility of what's going on. I may very well be wrong but I felt like it might help.

I was wondering about the possibility of it being similar to a DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. Not enough to make the entire site crash but enough to make it quite slow. I even wondered about a disgruntled former poster or someone doing it because there are unfortunately services where you can pay money (usually not very much!) and have them swamp a site with "users" and sometimes it's enough to take the site down and sometimes just enough to make it very slow. It's like how now people can now pay a service and buy followers on social media or buy subscribers to their YouTube channels. Just a thought. I find it very odd there are consistently 10s of thousands of "people" viewing the site at all times. They could be bots scrubbing data for search engines but it just seems to me like that's a less likely scenario considering it's 24/7. And they only seem to be viewing the home page and not in threads or topic sections.

Thanks for trying to keep the board running. I appreciate it. I'm probably far off and you've probably already looked into this but I felt like I should share it. I just find the whole thing quite odd.

[Ive always been a dreamer]

Thanks for the info, Austin. We'll definately look into this.

[sodascouts]

I was told this might be possible, Austin. You're a very smart guy. I've been investigating some solutions.