Evafics.net Status

[amitakartok]

Did he reply?

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
Of course. I tell him every time it happens.

[amitakartok]

And now the site is down entirely.

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
Yep, sucks.

[Iuvenal]

Drupal

[amitakartok]

Site's back up since yesterday. Nothing in the news about what caused the outage, just more crap that should belong on a blog.

[C.W. Smith]

I'm working on it. And frankly all that stuff is me creating content.

I stopped allowing new accounts on the page. It's killed the spambot issue. I've also turned off the queing modules.

I post on the page stuff that is important related to the groups it's put under. Front page gets a total of it all save for anything on Lemontastica. That is almost completely stand alone.

Just not sure how to fix the spambot issue aside from the extreme measures I've taken.

And if you think things like that belong on a blog, just remember that that is still my page, so I try and create content for it no matter what.

[ChaddyManPrime]

^
I've noticed everytime I've posted that I have to wait for moderator approval, am I doing something wrong?

[amitakartok]

It was an anti-spambot measure. He turned it off a few weeks ago.

[C.W. Smith]

Yeah... sorry about that.

Spambots have become a plague. I had to institute measures that unfortunately weren't as learning as the module said it was. I'm trying to figure out a better way while rebuilding and refitting things to be more capable in the future... I hope.

If anyone has any suggestions or is willing to lend a hand on the database data cleaning I'd appreciate it.

Otherwise.... I'm still working on it and if you have issues try and contact me directly either through Facebook or the Fanbards COntact form. IT gets sent directly to my email.

[amitakartok]

Judging from how the bots seem to be able to get past the captcha, I'm guessing that their controller is actively shepherding them, in which case anti-bot measures like select-images-with-cats captchas are not going to work.

Have you thought about not allowing automated form registration (ie. the way users normally register on forums) but instead manually adding users who ask? Even if the bots figure out where to send the request, you'd instantly see through copy-pasted requests. Or even better, you mail them back asking for confirmation on the grounds that a spambot won't reply or if it does, it will send a copy-pasted one.

[pwhodges]

(You have a PM detailing two highly effective measures.)

[C.W. Smith]

amitakartok, I've actually implemented that currently as a stopgap until I can get something more concrete to secure against spambots.

pwhodges, I took your advice and downloaded the spambot drupal module. This is the Drupal module that utilizes the site you informed me about. I've tried it before with bad results, but part of it may have been because I was behind a cloudflare proxy. I'm recompiling everything in cpanel to include cloudeflare's module so real ip's get reported now. We'll see.

[pwhodges]

I am using the SMF module for that site behind CloudFlare on another forum with no ill effects.

[C.W. Smith]

well, it's causing me some issues at the server level. I installed th ecloudflare modual into apache and now I've lost aconnection to my localhost apache solr server and the system can't run cron anymore. I'm going to reset the server to what it was originally... and I'm tempted to redo my nameservers to point towards the server without cloudflare in the middle.

[pwhodges]

I have no experience of Drupal, so I can't comment on anything on that side, I'm afraid.

[C.W. Smith]

No sweat, I was using cloudflare to try and combat spam anyways... it worked for a long time but now I have to do it all manually with fewer free tools then before.

[C.W. Smith]

So I've got the main feature set for Bookshelf pretty much done I think. I only have my own expectations right now to work from so who knows. It's also why I'm doing it's development separate from fixing up the main page.

I've managed to figure out how to get the story list on the chapter add page to only show the stories of the author listed in the by field. It will only work though if you aren't the original creator. Not a bad thing for a site with many things. Doesn't allow for easily creating chapters for folk, but there comes a point where you have to give up on trying to keep them up to date I suppose.

Any input would be welcome.

[Iuvenal]

Last time I looked, there were some stories (don't have a link handy right now) that showed up as having no chapters when you click on them.

[C.W. Smith]

Yeah, some are like that. All the chapters and stories need to be looked through and cleaned up.