Spam bot

As you can see (at the time of writing anyway) we got hit by an aggressive spambot. The user was shut down in the Hub but its active Forum session stayed alive so it kept on posting until I shut down & restarted the account services at the web site back-end.

It’s posted so many articles that manually cleaning them up doesn’t really make much sense so I’m looking into an automated session, but it’s been a long time since I looked into the forum’s database engine & tried to figure out what’s what – please bear with me while I get it sorted.

Thanks!

I was trying to delete them as they were coming in. Now I can’t delete them manually.

… well done, Andrew, I see you succeeded!

There were thousands of posts by that user by the time it got killed. The recaptcha clearly isn’t good enough but time doesn’t permit me to investigate better solutions that still work for real humans! For now, I hit it with a great big stick:

https://www.riscosopen.org/tracker/repository/changesets/469

Apologies for the downtime during normal business hours in the UK; there really wasn’t any choice but to shut it down immediately before things got any more out of hand.

…oh and in passing, I think I fixed the super-slow bug tracker.

• It uses the database to store session information
• The maintenance task to clear stale session data wasn’t working
• This particular site component hadn’t got an index on the session ID column in the database, so as stale sessions accumulated, it just got slower and slower

I’ve cleaned the session table (this accounted for the majority of today’s downtime – there were many millions of rows present) and added the missing index by hand. I’ve checked all other session storage engines and they’re functioning normally, with appropriate indices present in the database.

What I haven’t done is figure out why the Hub engine keeps logging you out “for a while” if the Hub worker is shut down. I’m afraid you’ll all have to live with that; it’ll resolve itself in a few hours. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s something to do with time zones.

If you don’t want to lose any forum posts, keep a Hub account tab/window open in your browser. Just before you make a post or reply on the forum, reload your Hub page. Sign in again if necessary, then immediately submit your forum content.

Sorry for the hassle. We can’t get everything fixed all at once, because then you’d all have nothing to look forward to :-P

We can’t get everything fixed all at once, because then you’d all have nothing to look forward to

I like that. I think I’ll steal it and use it myself. :-)

Jim

…oh and in passing, I think I fixed the super-slow bug tracker.

It doesn’t seem right. You could always boil the kettle when clicking on bugs and always got a buzz if the page appeared. You’ve spoilt it :-(

oh and in passing, I think I fixed the super-slow bug tracker.

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good! Well done.

Jim:

> you’d all have nothing to look forward to

If you’re using it, perhaps correct the grammar – “to which to look forward”. Unless up with that you shall not put, of course.

…oh and in passing, I think I fixed the super-slow bug tracker.

Hurrah! Many thanks.

Don’t worry, the only grammar I’ve known was married to my grandad. :-)

Jim

Not wishing to be out-pedanted, I think the verb in question is “to look forward to”, not “to look forward” plus a preposition. If I am correct, that final “to” is not a preposition, but an integral part of the verb, in which case it’s perfectly reasonable to end the sentence with it, or, as Yoda might say, it with.

https://www.riscosopen.org/tracker/repository/changesets/469

A man after my own heart. We all thank you profusely.
Oh, and we actually have a bug tracker again. Whoopee!!!

Somewhat ironically, the new message has “assistance” misspelled :)

Those of us (of a certain age) who remember early copies of the Guinness Book of Records – late 50s/early 60s – might recall this record-breaking number of sentence-ending prepositions.

It concerns a child which questioned its mother with regard to the bed-time story about Australia she had brought to the bedroom and which the child had no interest in.

“Mummy, why did you bring that book I don’t want to be read to out of about Down-Under up for?”

Artificial, perhaps, but entertaining nonetheless.

I think you mean “Mummy, what did you bring that book…”