01-08-2017, 03:12 PM
Peter
The intent of 'closing the forum' is mainly to stop hackers and spammers, but also to reduce wasteful / unwanted web traffic. There are many web-bots out there that traverse the site looking for weak spots - entry points to gain access and introduce spam or take control of the server. My observations to date show that China, Brazil, Ukraine, Russian Federation, Thailand etc all have very active hackers while some of the European countries, particularly France, have very hostile spambots. If you were around yesterday, 'Doug4King' managed to register but was only active for under an hour before I purged the login and locked out the IP range - but if I wasn't around to see it then more issues were likely to arise.
As stated previously, determining who is accessing the server purely by the IP address is a slow and wasteful process but by forcing the login then the username plus IP are displayed as an immediate match - those I then do not have to be concerned with.
The forum traffic figures far exceed the expectation generated by the volume of registered users doing daily checkins plus 3 search engines traversing the site. Only Google, Yahoo and Bing were allowed access to the open site but that did not stop other bots from trying to do so, generating more traffic and slowing the server response.
The 'closed state' is only a trial, one that can be terminated anytime. Maybe even tomorrow. I simply don't know yet as I haven't seen the improvement that I wanted / needed.
Doug, Admin
The intent of 'closing the forum' is mainly to stop hackers and spammers, but also to reduce wasteful / unwanted web traffic. There are many web-bots out there that traverse the site looking for weak spots - entry points to gain access and introduce spam or take control of the server. My observations to date show that China, Brazil, Ukraine, Russian Federation, Thailand etc all have very active hackers while some of the European countries, particularly France, have very hostile spambots. If you were around yesterday, 'Doug4King' managed to register but was only active for under an hour before I purged the login and locked out the IP range - but if I wasn't around to see it then more issues were likely to arise.
As stated previously, determining who is accessing the server purely by the IP address is a slow and wasteful process but by forcing the login then the username plus IP are displayed as an immediate match - those I then do not have to be concerned with.
The forum traffic figures far exceed the expectation generated by the volume of registered users doing daily checkins plus 3 search engines traversing the site. Only Google, Yahoo and Bing were allowed access to the open site but that did not stop other bots from trying to do so, generating more traffic and slowing the server response.
The 'closed state' is only a trial, one that can be terminated anytime. Maybe even tomorrow. I simply don't know yet as I haven't seen the improvement that I wanted / needed.
Doug, Admin
Doug VK4ADC @ QG62LG51
http://www.vk4adc.com
This Forum is only going to be as interesting as the posts it contains.
If you have a comment or question, post it as it may trigger or answer the query in someone else's mind.
http://www.vk4adc.com
This Forum is only going to be as interesting as the posts it contains.
If you have a comment or question, post it as it may trigger or answer the query in someone else's mind.