Although this doesn’t apply to most of you (99%), I still want it to be public knowledge.
From this point forward, I’m banning anyone who uses browser plug-ins or external applications to maliciously send an unreasonable number of GET requests to the WTC server. By “unreasonable”, I mean thousands per hour.
I usually turn a blind eye to this particular issue because it comes with the territory of running a website and it hasn’t been a huge problem until recently. Now that it’s become a big issue, however, I won’t hesitate to ban entire IP ranges if that’s what it takes to make it stop. The server cannot handle the load and I’m tired of fucking with it.
Thank you.
I have no idea, but this wouldnt have anything to do with why my sprint mobile phone cant get you guys anymore would it? I was at work and I used to be able to and now suddenly I cannot. I haven’t done anything with my phone… kinda sucks, I love this site!
Lunchbox – How long ago did you start experiencing the problem?
What kind of plug-ins are doing it? Are they standard extensions for Firefox you get from the Mozilla site? Some names would be good.
What is it exactly thats screwing things up? are people mass downloading or something?
sorry for the n00b question. i hope it gets sorted!
d.
So I’m hoping that feed aggregators like Feed Demon isn’t causing the problem. I’m not too technical on it, but it does refresh the second a new post is made.
If it is, I suppose I can try to find a way to make it only check every hour or something.
Charneus
Could I ask what a GET request is? Using Opera, I had it refreshing my WTC home-page every five minutes. But five only goes into sixty twelve times, therefore I guess I’m sending twelve GET requests an hour?
I did some more digging into this issue today.
To answer you all at once, the issue is that script kiddies and blogspam bots are trying to sequentially call all of the post pages in the site archives for one reason or another.
What these morons don’t realize is that they’re sapping the server, causing it to randomly reboot and generally eating up valuable network resources. Unchecked, I’d have to shut the site down within a week… and then nobody would have access.