forum attack

[nikos]

if you check the forum topic read counters, they are over the roof. I have been monitoring it for some days, and decided to block some idiot guest IP addresses from singapore apparently.

what a pointless waste of time, I wonder why they do it? 12GB a day bandwidth for the forum, 6 times greater than the main website
(I have problems there too from similar nuisance "bots")

[Kilmatead]

iI wonder why they do it?

All your topic are belong to us.

[nikos]

doesn't make sense, they are wasting their and our resources ... for what?
only if it is a global plot by chinese govt to wear out western civilization by slow decay

also for the main website, pure waste of everybody's time for no gain to them whatsoever

[Brig]

It's a childish act of vandalism. It's the doing of it and not getting caught that appeals to the destructive child.

We in the U.S. have a government being run like that, by the same types of children.

[nikos]

at least the IP block seems to have stopped these particular naughty kids, for the time being!

[Kilmatead]

So I guess now is not a good time to ask about getting those forum-email-notifications active again? That was a self-immolating bit of vandalism itself.

[nikos]

I am no forum specialist, and can't be bothered to become one. If you or anyone else thinks they can enable these emails (without spamming the world+dog), be my guest! I will offer you full admin access to the forum internals

[Kilmatead]

If you or anyone else thinks...

I nominate Tuxman, he's always claiming to know about this kind of stuff - my bowels go all soft and gooey at things that can't just be written in C and sleep on local machines. I'd not give Tux admin access to anything though - he's likely to get it into his linux-based head to "improve" it by gutting it...

Having just wasted an entire day failing to upgrade a Gimp2 script to Gimp3 - at least I know why it fails now, but my confidence is low. The Scheme language (or the Gimp variant called Script-Fu [yes, really!]), is just weird Lisp stuff, for which King Ferdinand's part may be apocryphal, but I'll blame him anyway.

[Tuxman]

I nominate Tuxman, he's always claiming to know about this kind of stuff

I've configured phpBBs before when I didn't even know what a Kilmatead was; back when every bum and his dog had a phpBB. (Which one was me, I won't tell you.) I'd say I'm actually not that bad at it, although I haven't done it for a very long time. It should be noted that phpBB is only really fun if you fill it with plugins. Disadvantage: Any endeavour to achieve security is then doomed to failure.

I'd not give Tux admin access to anything though - he's likely to get it into his linux-based head to "improve" it by gutting it...

I feel seriously misunderstood. Never again would I think of having anything to do with Linux. I cancelled my last attempt to work productively with Linux in 2010, when the silly happiness ideas that happen with every distribution upgrade, even under Debian Linux, ruined an entire weekend for me. Since then, I haven't done anything like Linux to any of my servers (I made an exception for only one laptop, which I gave away again).

So if it makes you feel any better, none of my gutting is because my head had been linuxed.

The Scheme language (or the Gimp variant called Script-Fu [yes, really!]), is just weird Lisp stuff

Lisps are wonderful languages for scripting, especially when compared to Lua which is used by too many software these days. I know that you would probably prefer C, but an embedded C interpreter would have its disadvantages.

[nikos]

I also have filed Tuxman as "network/forum specialist"
do you want the honour?
Nothing special, don't go over the top with plugins, keep it simple
just activate safe emails using a special email address for communication (I'll create a new one for this)
what do you say?
(whatever can be done with an admin account for phpbb)

[Tuxman]

I surely could, given that you'll give me some time to crawl back into phpBB's internals to 1) understand what's going on with it these days and 2) understand what "safe e-mails" are meant to be.

[nikos]

see my PM