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The site was down for a few hours today while Piper and I fought off some reaper bots. We firewalled their ISPs, all of which were in China, and while we were at it, we firewalled out some spammers, too. Took about four hours of solid work.
The rumors of BCs demise were greatly exaggerated. :)
Hugs,
Erin
Comments
Okay, I'm confused. What's
Okay, I'm confused. What's does a Reaper Bot from Quake have to do with the site? The only 'reaper' I can think of in terms of attacking a site is WebReaper.
If so, maybe this will help.
http://en.linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_stop_automated_spam-bots_us...
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
.htaccess files
We have that kind of thing set up with a whole long list of malicious bots blocked from seeing the site.
Problem is, there are a lot of them and they change their identifying marks and ip addresses. This afternoon, Piper and I blocked about 4 million ip addresses in China. Perhaps a few innocent Chinese BC fans but we have a lot more fans elsewhere. It's a tradeoff.
It used to be Moldova and the Ukraine hosted lots of bots and spammers but lately it has been almost all China. The US, UK, Italy, Australia and Germany have the next most offenders in recent records. Those we block by individual addresses, using tweezers as it were. For China, we got out the skip loader because massive distributed attacks require massive retaliation. The largest block we banned today was half a million addresses.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Thanks Erin and Piper. :) Are
reaper bots as bad as Spam bots?
May Your Light Forever Shine
Worse really
Spammers are just annoying, reapers can actually take down the server. One of the reapers today was attempting to suck up all the content on BC, hitting the site hundreds of times a minute. trying to load pages. This went on for hours, causing the site to be slow and unresponsive to legitimate visitors. So slow the server became that it was difficult to use diagnostic tools to figure out what was actually happening. We stopped and restarted the server several times and ran diagnostics to be sure we weren't having a database or hardware problem.
Nope. Just a bunch of bogus traffic. At this moment, we don't actually know if we got the right bots blocked, there were several. The attack stopped but it was getting along toward Sunday evening in China when it did. Who knows? Maybe the kid had homework to do for school on Monday.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Damage or theft?
Are they trying to steal content, or take down the site do you think?
Malice or incompetence?
"Never ascribe to malice anything that could be incompetence." Ok, there are a lot of evil idiots out there, but there are even more plain idiots. Used to be most of these types of "attacks" turned out to be someone writing a search engine robot to pull data and they screw up delays, parallelisation, or something like that. :-(
Thus "reaper" bots - trying to farm/collect data but killing everything they come across.
Thank You
All of you for your hard work keeping this little world safe for us to visit. THIS SITE HAS BECOME SUCH AN IMPORTANT PART OF MY LIFE. I would dearly love to spend some major effort in smiting these cretins. Or maybe opening a case of wop A$$ on there sorry donkeys.
Great Gratitude
Michele
With those with open eyes the world reads like a book
The Grim Reapers..
Thank you all for all your hard work in keeping BC alive.
It is much Appreciated.
It might also explain why FM is off-line. :(
Let me join the others in
Let me join the others in saying "Thank You" Erin, Piper, and all the others who help to keep BC safe and operational. Your efforts are very much appreciated by all of us.
Mark <3
I've said it before,and I'll repeat it now.
We all owe an ENORMOUS debt to Erin, Piper, Sephrena, Frank, Jenna, and ALL the others who keep Top Shelf up and running! They have all poured their work, time, and money into the site to keep it a friendly, open place for us to gather, talk, read, post our stories, and receive feedback on our work.
Top Shelf is THE number one, biggest repository of FREE TG Fiction on the internet, and it stays that way because of all that the Administrators and site owner do.
From my heart, to all of you... THANK YOU!
Huggles and love,
Catherine Linda Michel
As a T-woman, I do have a Y chromosome... it's just in cursive, pink script.