Robots from Mars

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The site was out for about an hour due to an attack or just a clumsy bot hanging the site by trying to use the search. Search is off while we keep trying to figure out what was going on.

Hugs,
Erin

Comments

Thanks Erin and Bob.

Your hard work and vigilance to keep the site up and running are definitely appreciated.

Hugs 'n stuff,
Cathy

As a T-woman, I do have a Y chromosome... it's just in cursive, pink script. Y_0.jpg

Search turned off for visitors

erin's picture

Okay, in order to prevent what happened, we hope, search is now turned off for visitors and will shut off for everyone if there are more than 300 people on the site. Hope this works.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

I really doubt it was an

I really doubt it was an attacker. I've had to deal with that in the past (long past, now), but I've had to deal with a lot of bot problems. Some of the crawlers from China and South America are so badly written that they end up locking sites up, especially CMS systems. The problem is that it's very difficult to stop them, because they usually ignore the robots.txt file completely.


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.

Yup

erin's picture

What seems to have happened was a couple of visitors were doing some intensive searching at the same time a badly behaved bot was crawling the site. Sproing!

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Was this connected to ...

... the 'blog' that turned out to be an advertisement for something or other? I genuinely can't remember because I exited as soon as I realised what it was.

Anyway, thanks for keeping things on a more or less even keel.

Robi

Naw, the spammer was already blocked

erin's picture

Between Puddin and I, we had taken care of that.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

It coulda been me.

I got a strange email this morning from the PSU Muslim Student site, and opened it, only to find out to my dismay that they were selling viagra!

Later I noticed a similar heading on the BCTS site. If I did, sorry.

Khadijah

The spamvert

shiraz's picture

I still have a copy of the spam posting in my RSS reader.

 
Topsy
Mostly Harmless

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Paperback cover Boat That Frocked.png

Bot hits?

Could this be why I've been getting 1 to 5 hits on each and all of my stories lately? (It's made me sad to get so many hits and no, none, zero, kudos. So I'd like to blame tasteless bots.)

Spam

I've had my e-mail address book and my e-mail @msn.com which is on MicroSofts own site attacked by someone and using the e-mail addresses of everybody here that I have e-mail address for and some more addresses I have never seen before and they have been sending SPAM to all those addresses using my addresses to mail them with. There has been over a hundred returned to me every day. If you got one of those I'm sorry, I'm in the process of transfering all my personal addresses to another address as the only way MicroSoft told to elimate the problem. It makes me sad as I have had this address for almost Twenty Years and It is in alot of my account for doing business on the net and I have to go to those accounts to chg to my new/backup address. Again I'm Sorry if you recieved one of those SPAM mails! Sorry! Richard

Richard

I'd suggest that mostly you

I'd suggest that mostly you just reset the password to something complicated. If they broke in, they've got the old password. It doesn't invalidate the old address, it just means you got abused. Put in a better password so they can't get in again.

I've had that happen in the past - to my hotmail account, interestingly enough. Luckily, there were only two people in the address book, and I think those were both dead addresses :)

BW


I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.