Welcome To the temp AUKN Forum

So remember when Paul was afraid i'd one day take over

So... Wasn't the new make-over supposed to be for the better? Well, I don't mind. I'm just more disappointed that "Lawrence" was already taken as a username. Now maes will get confused.

Just out of curiosity, what did the spammers do? I assume it must be kinda bad if you went to the effort of making a new forum till everything is okay again.

Glad we got temp forums now, since I missed going on the actual forum yesterday.

I go away for the weekend and I come back and the world has ended.

Is myanimelist.net down too? I'm getting weird errors when I try to go there, says I've been banned or something but I'm not even logged in, nor have I been for some time.

It is most congenial of Ryo to adopt the role of the scapegoat. All we must now do is compile a list of further misdoings for which we can blame him.

The spammers didn't do anything specific or interesting, I'm afraid. The site is simply being hit with lots of requests (except they can't sign up as they are robots) which is forcing it out of commission due to excessive use.

I just checked MAL (though I don't use it) and the site seems fine, fourthlion. Perhaps a temporary issue? Or they could have IP banned you for some reason :s

R

Thanks Rui. I think I might know what it is actually, I'm on my work computer right now and I work for the company that run the ads on MAL and I have all kinds of debug stuff running on the PC for those ads... so they probably think I'm doing something to their site I shouldn't be as it messes with javascript and allsorts.

Seems okay if I log in from my phone. Ah well. No MAL at work

Hope this site goes back up soon or I won't know what i should be spending all my money on!

D:

This was all a bit difficult to take on the back of already having to adjust to the change to the "new" forum.

Guessing these things just search out any new forum created with whatever software version we had moved to?

Glad "ilmaestro" wasn't taken on here, this stuart-says-yes character looks like the sort of guy who would nab awesome usernames for his own up-to-no-good-ness.

The spam problem had prompted the forum switch rather than the other way around; resource use had jumped, so the boss tried upgrading the forum software to reduce it, only to find that it didn't help and now we had a new forum to fix up while still receiving warnings from the host. A pickle. I think a lot of it was just automated bots (e.g. various search engines and indexing sites which subsequently found us via said search engines) crawling all of the thousands of pages of the forums and hogging server resources, but whatever the cause there's nothing we mods can do at the moment.

It's weird being off duty. It feels like being unexpectedly fired

R

Signed up here after realising that no amount of F5-ing was bringing the forum back to life. Woe.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

I'm gonna keep going though.

That was odd, registering under my old user name got borked with an account doesn't exist message (but then re-reregistering got a user name taken denial).

Nuke Spammers!

Great! Now the old name works!

Hey, I'm a dual, my second post and I'm breaking forum etiquette. Let's see if I can delete the other account.

Edit: Turns out I can't. If anyone can delete "Just Passing Through You" I'd be grateful.

Just Passing Through You wrote:Nuke Spammers!

To the one with multiple accounts I say this: Tu quoque.

I have always wanted to use that phrase in a sentence.

Took me about 5 minutes to work out how to actually reply, only to figure out that I wasn't actually logged in. sigh.

And just to confuse everyone i've changed my user name to something far more current than my old one, which I never use on anything anymore (MercenaryRaiden)

I think a lot of it was just automated bots (e.g. various search engines and indexing sites which subsequently found us via said search engines) crawling all of the thousands of pages of the forums and hogging server resources, but whatever the cause there's nothing we mods can do at the moment.

Oh! Was that what those "Google[Bot]" and "Index[Bot]" that were, seemingly, constanting in the active users bit?

Froob McGuffin wrote:Oh! Was that what those "Google[Bot]" and "Index[Bot]" that were, seemingly, constanting in the active users bit?

Partly; they're normally active on any site but the big search engines never seemed to stop. They were always there in the past by the way, it's just the new forum software made them show up for the first time (boring slightly longer explanation: the new forum software contained functionality which tried to reduce the effect of 'legit' bots like Google by giving them their own logins, so they didn't keep trying to automatically sign up each time they checked the site, only it didn't actually help at all for Chaos as the problem was too big).

There are ways around it all, but it's down to Chaos to make a lot of decisions first, and he indicated informally that it would be a few days at best before things come back up.

R

Does the forum software you use have some sort of a spam filter you can just download? If not, then good chance to look at vBulletin?

I re-registered here as myself (as was).
I can't get the forum and I'm not viewing from work (off this week-yay!) just using a regular laptop with Avast! over BT Infinity so I'm not sure it's a IP thing (having moderated sites I know what an IP ban can do).

theirsbailiff wrote:Does the forum software you use have some sort of a spam filter you can just download? If not, then good chance to look at vBulletin?

The problem is at the host level I think; they need to be filtering out the spam traffic before it hammers the BBS installation but for whatever reason either that's either no longer happening properly or it's massively increased recently. phpBB's built-in spam filtering is quite good, but by the time it is able to touch the traffic the damage has already been done.

I'm as powerless as anyone else the way things are so we just have to pin our hopes on Chaos :/

R

emergency forum <3

I was starting to get a bit worried

and boo Cathe was taken. So that meant I actually had to think of a username for once

Rui wrote:I'm as powerless as anyone else the way things are so we just have to pin our hopes on Chaos :/

God Speed, Chaos! You'll deserve another of those "Long Island Iced Teas" after overcoming this ordeal.

It feels quite eerie round here. Drokking spammers, beat em Chaos, I believe in you!

There's a memberlist and it only shows 21 members - how can names that aren't on that list be taken? Not that it will matter in the long run, hopefully.

Definitely feels a bit odd here - feels very sterile! Glad to have somewhere to post though, was going nuts without the forum yesterday.

voxphantom wrote:Definitely feels a bit odd here - feels very sterile! Glad to have somewhere to post though, was going nuts without the forum yesterday.

That's the thing, people build their routines around the internet these days.