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.

[WalshFan88]

If it is really this that is the cause of the slowdowns, that's really sad and lame that someone would go to the trouble to do that over ANY grievance they might have had (Eagles 3.0, etc). And it means we clearly live rent free in their heads. Imagine paying your own money, especially on a continuing basis, just to make someone you hate's website run a little slower and take up a few more seconds of our day for every task on said website that we don't even use every day. Sure it's annoying, just as a gnat that flies around your head is annoying. But it's not something that is really bothering us nor does it stop us. But they don't want to resort to anything more severe because they know they could get caught and it would be a criminal case. And to be honest IMO, even though it's not taking the site offline, if it's bandwidth stealing or is in any way caused by someone intentionally doing this - it should be prosecuted and treated the same as if it was causing an outage. IMO these "DDOS on demand" type services should be required to keep log of the name of the person, the payment information, and their own IP address so if they are presented with a warrant or subpeona you can find out who did it and take them to the cleaners. Not because we are so upset by this but if for no other reason, as a matter of principle that people who do this will be exposed and punished and shamed. The problem is because these services are shady to begin with, the reason they stay in business is the anonymity. It's a middle man to keep them from being investigated and prosecuted. It's like hiring a digital hitman. Who knows, maybe it is a computer wiz doing it themselves from their own networks that isn't bright enough to cover their tracks but more than likely they are using a service to do it for them. It's really such a cowardly move. And it really is just an annoyance at the end of the day. What a sad life they must have!

I am a bit familiar with this issue. I used to play online games on an Xbox and someone who I defeated and ticked off was able to somehow get my IP address and then paid a service to flood my home router with DDOS attacks which caused continously slow internet with occasional complete drop outs when it got overloaded. The router even started overheating. Which if it would have caught fire (probably unlikely but still!), they could have burned my house down. I ended up having to get my ISP to give us a new IP address. I don't think they ever looked into who it was because it's usuallly a paid service and almost impossible to track back to a single person. And usually if they do an investigation and crack down on them it's because a corporation with a lot of money is the one who got attacked, not some poor home user without the resources. You hear about them also all the time on big websites and services and someone gets arrested but again that's because either those companies are mission critical, have a lot of money, or are government agencies.

[FreyFollower]

I hope all can be resolved easily and quickly, without expense.
Wow, WF, some people are beyond crazy! I guess being an adult with self-control and humility is just too much for some folks!

[sodascouts]

OK, I've decided to re-open the board so that everybody can see it rather than just registered users once more. Let's see how it goes!

[WalshFan88]

Fingers crossed!