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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
 Posted - May 13 2003 : 4:03:51 PM
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Some may have noticed that the forum was flooded with useless garbage for a few days. The reason is pretty simple. For the past few months, there has been a kid that seems to get his jollies by entering useless and insulting information in all the forms on this site, as well as the guestbook. Normally, the crap is ignored and I delete the entries from the guestbook when they are made. However, it seems that he decided to "step up" his little waste of time and "attack" the forum. I don't know if he registered the account, or simply guessed an easy password. And frankly, I don't care.
The account he used (brian smith) has been deleted. All the flood posts have been cleared and things have been pretty much returned to normal. I believe that three topics were lost, but they were fairly dead anyway.
I would have dealt with it sooner, but I was away this past weekend at an RX-7 meet, then spent two days in Toronto on business. I did not have time to sit down for 10 minutes and fix things.
I have blocked a great portion of his ISPs subnet (AT&T in Chicago) at my router, so it is probably not even possible for him to access this site any more from his home/school. However, this doesn't mean that he can't come in from a friend's (yeah, like he would have any friends) computer, or an Internet Cafe, etc. But probably, the problem is mostly solved.
I would advise everyone to change their passwords if they are simple to guess. When I have some time, I plan to do a security audit. Anyone with easily guessed passwords (ie. password, their name, etc.) will have their account locked. I will send them an email explaining what happened and how to fix the situation. Since it is a major pain in the ass for me to do this, I would rather not (as it is also a privacy violation), but the world has once again forced me to deal with it's stupidity.
I will be locating this individual in the real world within the next few days, and since Chicago is only a 4 hour drive, will be paying him a visit when I get some time. I will also contact my lawyer to find out if anything useful can be done.
To those who use this forum properly, helping themselves and others: thank you!
To the abusers: bite me.
Edited by - Aaron Cake on May 13 2003 4:18:12 PM |
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n/a
DELETED (Inactive)
38 Posts |
Posted - May 13 2003 : 6:24:22 PM
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I think that some bulliten board programs have flood protection so that the person can only post so many topics/posts in a certain amount of time. Even somthing like one post per minuite is reasonable, because it would not kill someone to wait a minuite to post again.
I don't know if Snitz Forums have this, and if they did you would probably have already thought of this.
It seems that the person is probably just someone who wrote a simple VB script, by looking at the posts.
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - May 13 2003 : 6:42:38 PM
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Well, I dont know about yall but I would kind of find it annoying to have a big gap of time between posts. I like to be able to get on post and get off right after I get home from school. but if that is what it takes I wont complain. However I think that instead of having a time requirement you could have it keep you from posting more than once with the same title. I think that that would less likely that this would cause an inconveniance than a time delay
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 14 2003 : 12:23:39 PM
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Snitz Forums probably does have flood control in the newer verson, but upgrading would mean loosing all the posts. And as you can probably tell, this forum is not the baseline Snitz. I have made some modifications. These modifications would have to be transferred (if this is even possible...I have not seen the new Snitz code). This is a major headache. What I think I will do is simply modify this forum for flood control. Should be easy, and most likely there is already a mod out there that does what I need.
However, I will be certainly looking at the new version of Snitz, because it probably has some neat features.
As for the VB script, I highly doubt it. If you look at how long it took him to make all those posts (roughly 2.5 hours) you will see that he probably just sat there and hit "Post" over and over again. Truely pathetic to have that much time to waste. Judging by my dealings with this person, it is highly unlikely that he is capable of writing the necessary VB program to emulate the cookies required by the forum, and then make all the posts...I would be very surprised if this person could even program his VCR.
As far as the annoyance of flood control goes, it is a very small price to pay. Really, 30 seconds between posts is more then enough to discourage flooding, and usually won't interfer with legitimate posts as each poster who is accessing the board has his/her own "timeout". Rejecting posts based on title is a good thing as well, since there is no legitimate reason a poster will post two topics with the same title in the same forum.
I shouldn't say this, but I am actually going to start updating the site again in a week or so. One of the focuses will be on backend managabiity and security. There will be updates to the RX-7 sections, the feature and probably the "My Projects" section, as well as a new section for the Honda Insight. But that's about it. Most of the improvements will be on my side, and invisible to the user.
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - May 14 2003 : 2:23:31 PM
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Maybe you should consider adding more moderators, YS and Ben_Seg dont seem like bad guys. Just some more people to delete any repetitive posts. The more people the load is spread upon the less a load it is for everyone.
It would certainly be easier than revamping the code for the forum
Edited by - BEatonNo1 on May 14 2003 2:24:46 PM |
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 15 2003 : 09:33:44 AM
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Adding more moderators is akin to masking the symptoms instead of curing the disease. Flood control is something that is definitly needed, and I will be adding it to all the forms on my website including this forum. Not too hard to do really...I'd imagine only about 20 lines of code or so.
Still, I have been looking at the new version of Snitz and have been impressed. Should be possible to upgrade without loosing all posts, but I can't promise anything. We'll know when I finish updating the site. 
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - May 15 2003 : 3:20:32 PM
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maybe you could archive the old posts and just transfer the current ones. then if someone is looking for information they can still view the old posts after searching
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 15 2003 : 3:59:55 PM
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That's what I was thinking...but the question is "how?". I guess I could write a VB script to move all the posts over, but if I'm doing that, I might as well just import the whole database....
I am actually currently in the process of testing a highly modded version of Snitz 3.4 (this is 3.1). That's the reason this server was up and down in the past hour....I had to install a new database engine and update the MDAC files.
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - May 15 2003 : 4:47:19 PM
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Well...Good Luck!
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Virus
Apprentece
19 Posts |
Posted - May 15 2003 : 6:25:52 PM
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Aaron,
You should be the one being thanked. You have done a great job with your site and your forums and are a great help to many that have various questions. It is people with the expertise like you that deserve some gratification once in a while!
Good job!
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 17 2003 : 2:31:43 PM
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Well, the highly modded Snitz was just too much. No one really needs a calender of events, member photo gallery, crazy animations, etc. It just bogged down everything....
I have downloaded the baseline Snitz 3.4 and am currently modding it for functionality comparable to this forum, as well as a few other neat tricks that will be very useful. The side effect is that we should be able to keep all the posts from this forum as the database import should be easy. No idea when it will actually go online, because I have not yet finalized plans on exactly what is happening with this website update...
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n/a
DELETED (Inactive)
38 Posts |
Posted - May 19 2003 : 3:55:22 PM
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quote:
Well, I dont know about yall but I would kind of find it annoying to have a big gap of time between posts. I like to be able to get on post and get off right after I get home from school. but if that is what it takes I wont complain. However I think that instead of having a time requirement you could have it keep you from posting more than once with the same title. I think that that would less likely that this would cause an inconveniance than a time delay
I did not mean a large amount of time, but it should take at least 30 seconds to make an intelligent post. The amount of time between the flooder's posts was only a few seconds. I have been on forums like that and never noticed. Also, Aaron, I think that as few mods as possible is better. I sometimes use another forum which has as many mods as the webmaster could find, and most of them are not used.
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 19 2003 : 7:13:16 PM
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30 seconds is a good period of time. The RX-7 forum is set to 30 seconds, and the only time I ever bump into it is when I am posting page after page of pictures (because I already have the text written and simply copy and paste). So I will probably set things to 30. 1 minute is a long time, all things considered, and would certainly annoy me...
Believe me, I won't be over-modding the forum. However, there are some things that are "necessary" (such as message icons, smilies, etc.) and some nice features (such as the ability to post files, private messages, etc.).
On a related note, an employee from AT&T support in Montreal has emailed me privately with the physical address of our little annoyance. This employee has obviously chosen to remain anonymous, and their support is greatly appreciated. When there is time, I will deal with the situation. 
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BEatonNo1
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1133 Posts |
Posted - May 19 2003 : 9:47:29 PM
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Aaron, I beleve that I may have a solution to this problem. What if you limit the number of posts depending on a persons ranking. A new member Isnt going to make 10 posts. most likely someone joins because they have a question. Therefore it would be safe to say that a limit of 2 posts per day for a new member would not be too restricing. as someone moves up then they could be allowed more posts. In fact it would be safe to say that after a couple of advances the limit could be removed.
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Aaron Cake
Administrator
Canada
6718 Posts |
Posted - May 20 2003 : 09:46:43 AM
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Now that is an excellant idea.  It should not be very difficult to do in code once I update the forum. Though probably 5 posts per day is more reasonable, and once they are past 15, they can post all they want. Also, I plan to set up email notification to alert me if a user makes more then 3 posts in a row.
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