Know Your Xixax: Donation begging and site news

Started by Xixax, December 02, 2006, 08:52:14 PM

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Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: Sleepless on January 30, 2019, 09:42:15 AM
I got an error message a couple of hours ago saying the site had maxed out its bandwidth. Just an FYI. All seems fine again now obvs.

Yup. Here's a timeline of that issue:

A couple weeks ago, I checked our bandwidth and noticed that the usage was unusually high. I contacted tech support, and we did a couple minor things.

As month-end approached, I started getting warnings that we were reaching max bandwidth. I opened a ticket. Tech support (uncharacteristically) did not respond for a couple days.

Today, we reached our max bandwidth and tech support noticed my ticket. They helped us out: "As you may have noticed, the account simply stops working when the bandwidth is exceeded. I've given you a bit extra now so your site is back online."

They did more digging into our bandwidth usage and tightened up our firewall. More importantly, we identified three excessively scraping bots that are using 19% of our bandwidth. Yikes. So we're going to block them.

Of course if needed, we'll upgrade to a higher bandwidth. But filtering out the worst bots should be enough.

Sleepless

I figured you were on top of it. Since I'm one of the few typically on here early, thought it'd be worth mentioning. Thanks JB.
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Jeremy Blackman

Access is restored now, but only because we rolled over into February. No response to my ticket yet. But I'm sure we'll get this ironed out.

wilberfan

Yeah, I got the warning ("BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED...") around 2:30pm Pacific Time today...

Jeremy Blackman

I have a decent grasp now on how to block these bandwidth-hogging bots — some (most?) of which are malicious, some of which are spiders/crawlers going overboard. Our host has a tool that shows # of files accessed and total file size downloaded by a certain IP. So I will keep an eye on that and block the obvious ones.

If for some strange reason you get blocked from the website, email me at xixaxfilmforum@gmail.com

WorldForgot

Hey JB, in the new UI where do we click on a post to reveal its permalink?

Jeremy Blackman

Excellent question. I'm kind of sad about that, because as far as I can tell, there is no easy way to get the permalink anymore.

You can, however, get the URL by following this format:

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=NUMBER.msgNUMBER#msgNUMBER

Mouse over the "report to moderator" flag to see the topic # and message #.

So using that method, I could create a link to my post higher up on this page:

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9379.555.msg356333#msg356333

Jeremy Blackman

Alternative method:

If I use the quote function, it goes to a new compose page and shows me this:

[quote author=Jeremy Blackman link=topic=9379.msg356333#msg356333 date=1548977276]

The important part is this:

topic=9379.msg356333#msg356333

So I could start with this code:

http://xixax.com/index.php?

And simply add the "important part" onto it:

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9379.msg356333#msg356333

WorldForgot


Jeremy Blackman

Bandwidth update: looking good. We're now on track to use 33% of our bandwidth in a 30-day month.

Jeremy Blackman

This is long overdue, but... I made an edit so "8)" no longer turns into a smiley.

Now, when you need to swiftly create the sunglasses smiley (and don't we all sometimes), you'll need to use this code:

8-)

wilberfan

I thought of that the instant my last post with an "8)" turned into sunglasses dude...  Thanks for the tweak.

Sleepless

He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

Robyn

Now I can finally start my math thread without accidentally look cool.

Robyn

Sometimes I wish we could embed tweets here. Is it possible somehow, or do you guys not want that?