Recently, this site has become unstable. It is due to a TON of spammers trying to login in as admin, or flooding user registrations with fake ids in the hopes to be able to post spam ads as comments or activity stream items. As a result, the MySQL database keeps crashing due to too many Apache2 processes.
So, I’m instituting a very draconian new security thing. IP Blocking. If you screw up the login too many times, or continue to try to log in as admin or some other account in which you don’t have the password, your IP address is going to be block. Forever. Period. Unless you send an email to me explaining that you are some sort of Noob, drunk off your ass and couldn’t remember your password, or something plausible in your defense.
Unless someone wants to donate or fund a beefier server, that is the way it is. Hopefully the site won’t crash and things will be faster. (for example, I installed the new security plugin and it’s already blocked one person from China. It’s been like 4 minutes since installing it…..amazing).
UPDATE: I also removed the BuddyPress and BBForums stuff. No one was really using either, and they were sucking resources away from the site. I’ve always wanted a lively discussion forum happening here, but that seems not to be. Oh well.
It’s also interesting that most of the flood of IP addresses is out of pretty much ONE area of China…..go figure….
Tag: site status
Upgraded Site
I upgraded the site to Apache 2.2.8 and Php 5.2.5 (From Apache 1.3). Everything seems to be working ok. Let me know if something isn’t working.
We’re Back…..Part 2
Ok, after some tinkering, I think everything is working ok. The biggest problem was getting the site to send out Emails for new users and existing users who are subscribed to receive updates. If anyone is experiencing anything strange, drop me a post or email.
Moving From Slash To WordPress (DONE)
Ok, after a LOT of work on my end, 98% of the stories and files have been moved to WordPress. They have all been put into 4 categories, and tagged. Though, the tagging might need to be revistited in the future.
Things not moved are the user ids from the old slash site. Journals have not been moved either. Polls and the comments in them are one of the things that still need to be moved, and will be done so by the end of the weekend. The other thing that has not been moved yet is the player setup database I had. Not sure how I’m going to do that one at the moment…….I might need to learn a little PHP to do that.
There might be some links in stories that do not work. If anyone see these, please shoot me an email and a story link. These are kind of hard to find and fix…….
UPDATED 10/6/07 11:50PM by E: Ok, it’s done. The Slash site is offically gone. Perl has been removed from the Apache webserver. Memories of Slashcode start to fade…..
Tags and Categories
Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 was painless. However, they did change a number of things. Categories and Tags. Kind of confusing, but here is a quote to better explain it:
So categories can be tags but tags cannot be categories. Categories are like the huge signs you see on aisles in supermarkets – “Food”, “Hygiene”, “Frozen” etc, they guide you to sections where you can find what you are looking for. Tags are like the labels on the products themselves.
So, in an effort to clean up my categories, I’ve been tagging. Though, it is, like moving over the old Slash content, going to take some time.
The Dust Has Settled…..Sorta
Looks like things have settled down after the transition from Slash to WordPress. First, on the right you’ll see the Be Active header. Here you can write articles, questions, interesting things you saw on the net or heard about. Second, there are still about 300+ stories that have not been migrated from Slash to WordPress. It probably will be a couple of weeks until everything appears again.
New Site
Welcome to the new Site. Most all of the stories and comments transfered over. The ones that have not should be migrated over in the next week or two.
I think there might be some problems with the Login thing. Can someone check it out and post about it?
Fixed the Download problem I think……maybe……
Also fixed a cache problem. I think it works better now…..now if I could only get the old slash site up to continue to move stories and files over…….
Update 8/29/07, well, there still are about 500 some stories that need to be sifted through. It is long, and boring, and long and boring……but it is going. Hopefully some of the other patterns and pdfs will be up soon.
Update 8/31/07. Still have something like 500 stories/articles to sift through. Erg…..Hopefully sped things up here with some caching and some MySQL tuning.