QB64.org Forum

Active Forums => QB64 Discussion => Topic started by: RhoSigma on May 04, 2020, 06:21:19 am

Title: What's going on here?
Post by: RhoSigma on May 04, 2020, 06:21:19 am
Hi admins,

since approx. 24 houres I notice a massive Guest activity on the Who's online page:
https://www.qb64.org/forum/index.php?action=who

but it seems the same topics are referenced every second, Is our forum being attacked?
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 06:35:54 am
There has been a very intense QBasic-related series of tweets being published on Twitter and our account has been interacting. Could be a wave of curious visitors.

About it being the same topics, it could be interesting titles.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: RhoSigma on May 04, 2020, 07:04:19 am
Ahh, well then, I did suspect some kind of a spam attack...
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: bplus on May 04, 2020, 07:47:21 am
Ha! Man I never knew you could see what other people were reading! :)

Update: Oh look at the #1 Topic at this forum!
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Cobalt on May 04, 2020, 10:53:28 am
looks like my Tetris is getting checked out a fair bit today! Good or Bad though?
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 10:55:04 am
Yeah, this unfortunately is the work of bots, it seems:

  [ This attachment cannot be displayed inline in 'Print Page' view ]  
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: RhoSigma on May 04, 2020, 11:26:35 am
Yeah, and those will screw up the view histories, which Qwerky is so fixed to, as if they would provide any evidence of relevance of a specific user or project.

EDIT:
But at least it seems to be over now, It shows now 22 Guests/3 Users (1 Hidden), that's what I usually see in average here, 20-40 Guests, 0 to 5 users.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 11:33:44 am
All good then. Nothing we can do about it either, as I see it.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: SMcNeill on May 04, 2020, 11:49:21 am
It may be the internet archive machine at work, making a copy of the site for its own nefarious historical purposes.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: STxAxTIC on May 04, 2020, 11:56:28 am
Question is, did the bots do their work before or after [banned user] wanted his stuff all deleted? If the latter, his enemies are much bigger now.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 11:58:45 am
LOL! Hardly.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Dav on May 04, 2020, 01:03:52 pm
When I was helping to admin qbnews forum we would get periods of really big guest activity.  It happens when a new search engine is indexing the site, or an old one is updating their info on us.  On my personal forum years ago I coded a php function to show when a search engine  was crawling the forum by getting its user agent string - and also by ip address (because sometimes the user agent is a lie...).  Getting crawled is a good thing as it will bring in more users eventually because the site is known more.

- Dav
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 05:30:49 pm
Could be archive.org taking a snapshot as well.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Cobalt on May 04, 2020, 09:59:40 pm
Question is, did the bots do their work before or after [banned user] wanted his stuff all deleted? If the latter, his enemies are much bigger now.

WAIT!! WHAT??  CH wanted what?!!!
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: bplus on May 04, 2020, 11:19:08 pm
So [banned user]'s stuff got erased, so everyone who posted to those threads he started got erased, so whoever starts a thread owns it?
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: FellippeHeitor on May 04, 2020, 11:29:52 pm
Technically, yes.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Qwerkey on May 05, 2020, 07:10:15 am
the view histories, which Qwerky is so fixed to
These days, you've got to get obsessed with something to distract your mind from Covid-19!
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Pete on May 05, 2020, 12:06:06 pm
These days, you've got to get obsessed with something to distract your mind from Covid-19!

I distract myself from Covid-19, by calling it the Wuhan Virus.

Pete
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: bplus on May 05, 2020, 12:23:00 pm
Quote
I understand your trauma of having had your mods to [banned user]'s bits lost in the tantrum, but this feels a bit extreme 😅😅

I am not traumatized by loosing my mods in [banned user] threads, I am concerned about all the good that is destroyed by a fit of anger.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Cobalt on May 05, 2020, 12:44:32 pm
I distract myself from Covid-19, by calling it the Wuhan Virus.
Pete

"Chinco Virus"!

I am not traumatized by loosing my mods in [banned user] threads, I am concerned about all the good that is destroyed by a fit of anger.

I have to agree with B+ on that.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: _vince on May 05, 2020, 01:29:06 pm
I am not traumatized by loosing my mods in [banned user] threads, I am concerned about all the good that is destroyed by a fit of anger.

If you go to your forum profile and 'Show Posts' you can still see all your old posts in CH threads even though clicking on them leads to nowhere.  I'd go through that and save any lost bits of code if you have it.  I don't understand why CH wasn't just plain ignored, totally unnecessary even if he did have a legal argument, as if anything would've be done
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: STxAxTIC on May 05, 2020, 01:42:10 pm
You guys are probably right about not deleting his junk, purely out of principle, for I know it's not because of the substance or goals buried in his posts.

Maybe the terminology of our fine print was a bit constraining. It won't happen this way again. Consider your principle principal argument won bplus.

Still though, we didn't really lose shit.
Title: Re: What's going on here?
Post by: Pete on May 05, 2020, 02:24:07 pm
Turn the clock back 20 years to QBF, do this, and you'd have an all out war on your hands. I'm glad to see things are a lot less dramatic these days. To help handle these types of matters, after Mac passed, I decided to make a non-public forum I called Quarantine. If some posts got out of hand, I'd just move those threads there. Everything was preserved, it just wasn't public anymore. If anyone said, "Hey Pete, I had something important in all that removed stuff!" Well, I could go in and retrieve it. Maybe call it Murphy's Law, but just by having that non-public forum, I was never asked to retrieve anything.

Forum owners vs regulars: Yeah, this is an age old problem. It boils down to you can't please all of the regulars all of the time, most of the time, well basically, any of the time. Every time you float an idea, especially multi-phased ones, you run an increased risk of community dissension. Push it too far, and you have factions, with no clear majority support from anybody. That never happened to me, because that wasn't my first rodeo. Hey, anybody knows to get real wisdom, you don't climb up a mountain, apparently you just keep attending rodeos. Anyway this reminds me of the old joke about a camel is a horse a committee put together.

Personally, I love living in a republic, but that's a hard way to run an online community. A full on authoritarian model was more forgiving, back in the day. If fell out of love, or out of favor, with one QBasic forum, you just bounced your ASCII  to another one. That's just not possible these days; so, if [banned user] makes his way back to discuss QB64, post code, etc., I have no problem with that. I mean he didn't personally trash the hell out of someone, or threaten anyone, or did I miss something?

Pete