Super popular?

LOST6200

Storage is cool
Joined
May 30, 2005
Messages
737
Why are there so many peiple online' today? 48 useres this afternon is a new record, yet nobody in psoting this wekeed. Weird.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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We're bombarded with them. Handruin probably has to delete five or six accounts a week.

I don't post as much on the weekend because I'm usually out doing contract work, which usually means three or four hours in my car (no internet) and six or eight hours actually working. And I imagine other SFers probably have lives of some kind. :)
 

ddrueding

Fixture
Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,525
Location
Horsens, Denmark
I work pretty much every day. The only time I'm not online is when I'm dancing, Sailing, or driving. Come to think of it, that's about 60 hours a week!
 

iGary

Learning Storage Performance
Joined
Nov 22, 2002
Messages
236
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iLand
Mercutio said:
...We're bombarded with them. Handruin probably has to delete five or six accounts a week.

He missed getting rid of one. A search shows that the "faloppi" character has posted the exact same message with the exact same URL pointing to a blank webpage to *hundreds* of forums.



LunarMist said:
Perhaps it is the cyrillic alpahabet... ;)

Or the cynical alphabet. 8)


 

Handruin

Administrator
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A search on faloppi (at sf) revealed nothing suspicious. One post with a link to eBay to an auction which has now ended. The account has no referring URL's linked as a home page or anything else I would have deemed suspicious.

On a side note, there have been a lot less spam accounts with the latest version of vbulletin (3.6) partially due to the much-needed update for the image verification for new accounts. I can now customize it in many different ways.
 

Splash

Learning Storage Performance
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Seaworld
Handruin said:
A search on faloppi (at sf) revealed nothing suspicious.

I realise now that it was some of the new "people" that joined at about the same time (just before or just after) Faloppi did.

Those suspicious account names in all those other forums I mentioned above were doing one or two weird things. They were either posting a particular URL in forums or using that same URL in their profile's homepage. The URL in question was a webpage that was apparently using a some sort of IP address collection scheme. The webpage was hosted at what was likely an unsuspecting Italian ISP's website.

Faloppi is Italian, so there's the mixup on my part. Arghh.
 

P5-133XL

Xmas '97
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
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3,173
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Salem, Or
It does seem strange to have 100 people online as ghosts, when there are only 57 "active" members. I'd be nice if more of these people actually partisipated rather than simply being passive viewers. But that is an entirely different problem

However, SF is now regularly scanned by the standard search engines. My conclusion is that what is said here seems to attract people needing answers or at least what is talked about is of interest. So, they visit and if we can help, all the better.
 

Handruin

Administrator
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If you click on the Currently online, it will give you an idea of who is visiting the site. From the looks of things right now the 80+ connections are from Yahoo Slurp!. It may just be that time of the month for search engines. I know it seems hard to illustrate the good points of VB, but one of them is the searchability for search engines. They have a much easier time indexing us over phpbb.
 

Platform

Learning Storage Performance
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Rack 294, Pos. 10
P5-133XL said:
It does seem strange to have 100 people online...

How about 165 (!) at the moment.

There's a minor quantity of Google and MSN spiders, but well over 100 Yahoo! Slurp Spiders.



 

CityK

Storage Freak Apprentice
Joined
Sep 2, 2002
Messages
1,719
Just Liam and I tonight ...oh, and about 65 slurpy spiders. Grrrrrrrosssssss!
 

Platform

Learning Storage Performance
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LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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Feb 1, 2003
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USA
There were over 180 this afternoon. And why was the site down, again?
 

Handruin

Administrator
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I wasn't aware it was down. I don't know why we've been having so many users lately. The bot thing says they're from yahoo...
 

timwhit

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 23, 2002
Messages
5,278
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Chicago, IL
I think about blocking the Yahoo robot. Why would it be making over 100 connections to the server at the same time?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I've noticed a lot of brief outages lately. Five and ten minutes long, maybe, but there have been five in two days that I know of.
 

Handruin

Administrator
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I've noticed it too. I thought things would have been better after they fixed the router...but I've been seeing disconnect notices and outages every so often. I'll have to bite the bullet and investigate another hosting option on a more serious level now. The hosting company isn't even charging my credit card. I've submitted a ticket on 12/6/2006 and I've yet to get a response.
 

CityK

Storage Freak Apprentice
Joined
Sep 2, 2002
Messages
1,719
Ah, so it isn't my end this time ... I've noticed a number of them too lately (especially today when I tried to reply to time's post -- literally took twenty minutes or so)...I was thinking that it might have been DNS issues again on my side (one day soon I ought to fix my hosts file or just add multiple DNS servers to the list)
 

Dïscfärm

Learning Storage Performance
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Nov 22, 2002
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239
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Hïntërländs

If it weren't for all the spiders running around here from Yahoo, MSN, Google, and whatnot (hopefully not any Spiders On Drugz!), then "Super Popular" would NOT be an adequate description.

Currently Active Users: 72 (13 members and 59 guests)




 

LunarMist

I can't believe I'm a Fixture
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USA
The site was down again tonight. I think your ISP is going down the tubes. :(
 

Handruin

Administrator
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USA
I'll begin searching for another hosting company tonight. If you know of any that allow SSH access and scripting execution (which is required) let me know. :)
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
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I am omnipresent
I'm not terribly happy with Lunarpages.com hosting. I don't like the control panel they use for Windows hosting and their solution to the crush of spam is to just stop their mail servers and manually delete all mail queued for delivery. They do that basically weekly. On a randomly chosen weekday. During business hours.
 

LOST6200

Storage is cool
Joined
May 30, 2005
Messages
737
No wonder! the Site has been slow or dead soetimes laterly. I hope it all works out. :)
 

Handruin

Administrator
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I spoke to the owner at our hosting company and he put someone on the issue. Turns out there have been increased demand on the server and apache needed to be recompiled to allow for more resources (ie more concurrent users and more files opened). Let me know if you see this happen again.
 

timwhit

Hairy Aussie
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Jan 23, 2002
Messages
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Chicago, IL
The site was just down again for maybe 10-15 minutes. Then, I got a "Database" Error and then it came back up again.
 

Handruin

Administrator
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I also saw one earlier today, and Lunar posted in another thread that he had an outage a few minutes back. I was hoping to get them to fix the issue. I won't deny that moving is a huge PITA, but the availability is really a pain point now.
 
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