Are We Doooooomed

[RLWP]

Would a simple fix would be to only allow access to the forum registered users?

 

Ban guests from progressing past the CWF home page?

 

 

MtB

 

 

Personally, I would rather we didn't work that way - I hate arriving at a forum through a search engine and finding I have to sign up to read it. Generally I don't bother

 

Not my call though

 

Richard

[Guest]

Who have we peed of enough recently to warrant or provoke a DOS attack....?

[mayalld]

The majority of 'guests' usually appear to be viewing one specific topic. We do get a lot of traffic from India but it may be that some topics contain a word that is frequently used by google searchers from that area - I think that although our forum is quite big by our standards it is still sufficiently small and specialised to be under the radar of malicious attackers.

 

Which actually worries me more than a little.

 

We are indeed too small to be a feather in the cap of the average malicious attacker, which means that any malicious attack isn't for the kudos of bringing "a site" down. Rather it means that any malicious attack is probably very specific against us and likely to come from somebody with a grudge against the forum or some individual on the forum, or some interest in disabling this forum.

 

The fact that all the guests are viewing a specific topic seems about as clear as it can be that they are not guests, but bots repeatedly calling for the same data over and over again, because the person behind it has set that URL as the retrieval.

[Guest]

Which actually worries me more than a little.

 

We are indeed too small to be a feather in the cap of the average malicious attacker, which means that any malicious attack isn't for the kudos of bringing "a site" down. Rather it means that any malicious attack is probably very specific against us and likely to come from somebody with a grudge against the forum or some individual on the forum, or some interest in disabling this forum.

 

See my post above yours - my thoughts too..

[matty40s]

it's not just us, here is another site I use quite a bit.

 

Winterhighland suffered a suspected dofs attack earlier which crashed the server. It's taken a couple of hours to rebuild the file system and we are experiencing significant database corruption issues from the crash.

>>>>> SITE DOWN FROM 11.30PM THUR 7TH MARCH <<<<<

Following on from the earlier server outage caused initially by a DofS attack, several of the key large databases that power Winterhighland require to be rebuilt and this can not be carried out while the site is live, so unfortunately the site will be down from 11.30pm this evening.

It's not possible to give an estimate of time, it could be minutes, it could take several hours or it could fail altogether in which case the site will need to be rolled back to an earlier snapshot on the backup system.

[Paul C]

How about limiting the number of posts you can make per day, to 10? I know it would upset the one or two regulars who seem to have forum diahorroea, but it would mean 1) they'd think more carefully about the points they'd like to make on their posts and 2) others would also get a chance to get a post in, and read.understood, before a thread becomes a 10+ page long epic, which takes ages to read etc. And if they want to make more than 10 posts a day, they could become 'high users' and pay a membership charge for it, or something along those lines.

 

That or hope for (a) massive monetary donation(s).

[Guest]

How about limiting the number of posts you can make per day, to 10? I know it would upset the one or two regulars who seem to have forum diahorroea, but it would mean 1) they'd think more carefully about the points they'd like to make on their posts and 2) others would also get a chance to get a post in, and read.understood, before a thread becomes a 10+ page long epic, which takes ages to read etc. And if they want to make more than 10 posts a day, they could become 'high users' and pay a membership charge for it, or something along those lines.

 

That or hope for (a) massive monetary donation(s).

 

Or how about doing nothing of the sort?

 

If you consider somebodies contribution 'diahorroea' all you have to do is use the ignore function, for the record BTW some members have in the past made a financial contribution to the forum (all be it not a huge one) and if the call goes out again will I am sure be more than happy to do so.

[mayalld]

<br />How about limiting the number of posts you can make per day, to 10? I know it would upset the one or two regulars who seem to have forum diahorroea, but it would mean 1) they'd think more carefully about the points they'd like to make on their posts and 2) others would also get a chance to get a post in, and read.understood, before a thread becomes a 10+ page long epic, which takes ages to read etc. And if they want to make more than 10 posts a day, they could become 'high users' and pay a membership charge for it, or something along those lines.<br /><br />That or hope for (a) massive monetary donation(s).<br />

<br /><br /><br />

 

So, your response to a situation where the forum is being brought to its knees by people who are NOT members READING the site (or rather having an automated program retrieve data from the site) is to impose restrictions on members posting.

 

Very useful, I'm sure!

[Guest]

Just been a PITA (the forum that is) and -

 

2580 guests! active in last 15 minutes.

 

got to be a DOS attack shirley??

Edited March 8, 2013 by The Dog House

[carlt]

How about limiting the number of posts you can make per day, to 10? I know it would upset the one or two regulars who seem to have forum diahorroea,

How offensive.

 

The forum survives and is the most popular because of its contributors and yet you insult those who contribute the most.

[alan_fincher]

How about limiting the number of posts you can make per day, to 10? I know it would upset the one or two regulars who seem to have forum diahorroea, but it would mean 1) they'd think more carefully about the points they'd like to make on their posts and 2) others would also get a chance to get a post in, and read.understood, before a thread becomes a 10+ page long epic, which takes ages to read etc. And if they want to make more than 10 posts a day, they could become 'high users' and pay a membership charge for it, or something along those lines.

Tell you what - why don't we make it like the other canal forums with almost no posts and/or posters at all.......

 

There would be no visible problems with capacity if we did!

 

Just been a PITA (the forum that is) and -

 

2580 guests! active in last 15 minutes.

 

got to be a DOS attack shirley??

Yet now I'm only seeing just over 200!

 

It is all a bit odd, isn't it.

 

We appear to have broken new bounds this morning......

 

Online At Once Record

3,100

Today, 01:11 AM

[Guest]

All OK now and only 169 guests... in the last 15 minutes

[Chris Pink]

Which actually worries me more than a little.

 

We are indeed too small to be a feather in the cap of the average malicious attacker, which means that any malicious attack isn't for the kudos of bringing "a site" down. Rather it means that any malicious attack is probably very specific against us and likely to come from somebody with a grudge against the forum or some individual on the forum, or some interest in disabling this forum.

 

 

You could be right as if it is a DOD attack then it's not a very good one. Perhaps you could ask Daniel for sight of the logs?

 

The other thing that occurred to me is that perhaps the 'guests' are simply sessions left open every time the server throttles access.

 

Again looking at logs would show some clues

Edited March 8, 2013 by Chris Pink

[Guest]

Sweet it all now is...

 

 

 

 

ed to get words in the correct order.

Edited March 9, 2013 by The Dog House

[Ange]

Would a simple fix would be to only allow access to the forum registered users?

 

Ban guests from progressing past the CWF home page?

 

 

MtB

 

This is one good reason why that should never happen

 

Hi all, Firstly I would like to say Hello! complete newbie here to both boats and to the forum, although I have been lurking in the background for a while now reading interesting posts and doing months of research into the way of life living aboard, I can see you are all an incredibly helpful bunch so thought it best to ask my question here!

 

 

ETA no advertising on this forum please! I can't remember who suggested that as an inevitability but please no - this is a wonderful sanctuary from pop ups and banner ads. I'll happily put up with the occasional server error or make a donation to the coffers rather than let that happen.

Edited March 9, 2013 by Ange

[Peter Reed]

What Ange said plus a greenie.

[RLWP]

I see that we have had the counter reset:

 

Online At Once Record 684

Today, 12:23 AM

 

Richard

[Grace and Favour]

Did this marked increase in the number of visitors coincide with a migration of the servers on to a different bit of kit?

(or summ'at like that?)

[matty40s]

I see that we have had the counter reset:

 

Richard

 

It's a shame, as for so long it stood at that all time record high of 5000 plus on that freezingly cold winter of Dec 17th 2010 when we couldn't even open our cratches as they were solid as iron.

[DHutch]

I see that we have had the counter reset:

 

Richard

Indeed, I'm trying to get an indication of our resource requirements, so have reset it a few times recently. We're still not 100% sure what all the guests are and why there has been an apprnetly influx, but they will be a mixture of members/users who have not logged into the view the site, search engine bots, and it may also be that as the site becomes briefly unavailable and reappears what would otherwise be the same session is currently being counted multiple times. As far as we are aware this is not in anyway an attack on the forum or anything to be worried about.

 

Either way, I can now announce that we shall be moving host early next week to a VPS package which should give us a great deal more resource and put and end to the last fortnights issues with the current hosts shared package.

 

 

Daniel

[Keeping Up]

Either way, I can now announce that we shall be moving host early next week to a VPS package which should give us a great deal more resource and put and end to the last fortnights issues with the current hosts shared package.

 

Hoorah and thanks Daniel.

 

Don't forget to pass the begging bowl around if necessary to support the new package. I'm sure you'll find that it will quickly attract the usual collection of buttons, foreign coins, old lapel badges, etc.

[Guest]

Lots of forums have a 'donate by PayPal' button....makes donating a cinch.

[DHutch]

Lots of forums have a 'donate by PayPal' button....makes donating a cinch.

Yes indeed, and I shall be setting up a dedicated forum paypal account to better facilitate this shortly.

 

Daniel

[rjasmith]

Yes indeed, and I shall be setting up a dedicated forum paypal account to better facilitate this shortly.

 

Daniel

 

Good idea - I'll take KU's example and drop a few washers in there from time to time.

 

Thanks for your continued efforts in keeping CWDF going for all of us!

 

Richard

[steven wilkinson]

let me know when the PayPal button arrives