HF and Pages Loading Slow

[PatrThom]

I assume it means you'll have to register and get your minotaur penis diploma before you are allowed to post.

--Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

And the registration system is still pretty open, as long as you have a real e-mail address and don't have the same IP address as any of the other spambots we've banned, and your ip address doesn't show up on the communal "bad actors" ip lists our system checks against.

 

[Dave]

I feared this would be the solution and I floated it to Gas earlier. I just hate to have to do this. But we gotta do what we gotta do.

 

[Vrii]

I happened to glance at the online user stats yesterday, and it showed 6 registered users and 834 guests.

Not surprised this ended up being necessary.

 

[Ravenpoe]

I happened to glance at the online user stats yesterday, and it showed 6 registered users and 834 guests.

Not surprised this ended up being necessary.

The JCM horde broke loose.

 

[GasBandit]

I happened to glance at the online user stats yesterday, and it showed 6 registered users and 834 guests.

Not surprised this ended up being necessary.

And even with the unregistered gate closed, they're still tryin'. The vast majority of these "guests" seem to be SEO crawlers and AI content ingestors.

 

[ncts_dodge_man]

Could it be since we're running an older version of XenForo that could be something trying to find exploits for?

 

[GasBandit]

Could it be since we're running an older version of XenForo that could be something trying to find exploits for?

Most of the exploitative log entries I saw looked to be just throwing everything at the wall for every platform there is, just hunting for something that sticks. Mostly Wordpress. But apparently that was only half the battle, and locking out unregistered users from viewing content would not have affected that traffic. The majority of the CPU usage seemed to be tied up in something that was crawling the xenforo threads like a regular user, just clicking every single link and looking at every single page, probably for SEO and AI ingestion purposes. Shutting out unregistered "guests" from viewing content seems to have done the trick there.

 

[GasBandit]

Slowly but surely the bots seem to be learning they can't scrape... nonregistered traffic looks to have dropped by 66% so far.

 

[Dave]

Hopefully we can take the locks off the doors soon.

 

[bhamv3]

I'd like to be able to post nonsense to poison the AI scrapers.

 

[Bubble181]

I'd like to be able to post nonsense to poison the AI scrapers.

That's why we keep Yoshi and HickGlans around

 

[GasBandit]

Ok, I've opened the floodgates a crack. We've still got 20x more unregistered visitors than registered, but let's see if we have the same performance issues we did before. If we do, I'll drop the portcullis shut again.

 

[PatrThom]

Just sayin' I fully expect we'll have to go (and stay) members-only, since unprotected walls of text are apparently the modern digital equivalent of phosphate deposits.

--Patrick