Musicat contemplates the possibility of aggressive search engines:
In an unrelated thread, I just posted this remark, which is perhaps relevant to ask about here too:
So, here it is!
(Is that actually something that happens?)
Thanks for keeping us informed. I would strongly urge the SDMB to take the opportunity to consider moving to Xenforo.
I’ll second this. I’ve been running my board with them for years and they’ve been excellent. We’re much smaller, of course, but we’re also on their most basic hosting plan – they have VPS and dedicated server plans as well. And since they specialize in vBulletin hosting, they can tune mysql and apache far better than the average amateur.
Yeah, let’s sticky this.
We’ll probably be referring people to this thread as complaints arise … hopefully will be resolved soon but will take some time.
I found that activity from spambots, scrapers, and third-tier search engines catering to non-English speakers and the SEO crowd has risen dramatically over the past year. At one point, I had over 10,000 registration attempts from spambots in a day on my little board. (Fortunately, they all failed, but it still consumes bandwidth and processor cycles.)
Now, the traffic is down to a more reasonable level, with most of the site’s visitors being humans and legitimate spiders. How’d I do it? Simple. Blacklist IP blocks from Russia, China, Poland, Amazon AWS, and spam-friendly Web hosting providers. For those who think country blocks are discriminatory in some way, what would you do if 99.9%+ of traffic from a certain country was malicious?
We see this a lot as well. “Why do you ban me just because I live in _______?” Or “Why can’t I register with my email address?” (Not knowing that particular email domain is a haven for spammers.)
We try to apply blocks judiciously and modify them when necessary. But yes, spambot attacks like that are a problem for most all sites and will continue to be so, unfortunately. The proliferation of this kind of bad business diminishes the online experience for legitimate users. The smart person who figures out better tools to combat this sort of thing will be a hero in cyberspace.
A very new issue: today I noticed on my phone that it was automatically making everything lowercase so the 
emoticon wasn’t working properly because it was coming out as :d. This is very inconvenient especially due to the five-minute edit time limit. Please fix this as soon as possible.
Not from us. Didn’t start it, don’t know where it came from. Good luck to you.
Well, I have to say – and at the risk of jinxing myself – it’s running like a dream this morning. (It’s late Thursday morning now over here.) Perhaps Ed put the fear of god into the hamsters?
spam reported
I’m surprised that there’s more page views. The forums have been pretty quiet lately. Haven’t seen statistics but it seems like posts are way down.
I’m a creature of incredible regular habits. I start reading the board at anywhere from 6:30-7:00 AM EDT before work. Overnight, there are about 150 new posts since I logged out at 11:00-12:00 the night before.
When I get home from work on a weekday, anywhere from 5:45-6:45 PM EDT, there have been 200-275 posts since I went to work in the morning.
I don’t see much of a change anytime the last year or so.
Posting rates have been in steady decline for the past few years:
2010: Threads/day: 117, Posts/day: 3,730
2011: Threads/day: 109, Posts/day: 3,582
2012: Threads/day: 99, Posts/day: 3,339
2013: Threads/day: 88, Posts/day: 3,222 (1/1 to 6/5)
I’m guessing the reason page views have been climbing lately is the opening of the board to Google indexing, so we get quite a few more casual visitors who don’t hang around and post.
Hey, I was just able to do a search. First time it worked in about three weeks.
Did I just get lucky or have upgrades been made?
Same here. A good sign, but may just have been lucky timing.
In past cases of board issues, I noticed the problem early and often.
But not this time. I almost never see any issue at all. Quite speedy and reliable. The only thing is a couple times a week it resets the “last visited” time right after loading the first thread.
I am running Opera 12 with the worst of the ad stuff blocked. (I am also running my own user script that clears out a lot of the “decoration” on the pages.)
I’m wondering how much of the problem people are seeing are browser (cf. “tab reset” thread) or ad related. (And don’t give me any of that “ads don’t cause problems” crap. Yes they do. Badly fed ad services can really slow down page loading and cause other problems.)
As to searches, I use Google not just because of my guest status, but it gives me easy flexibility (people do know about “search tools”, right?) and is always going to be faster.
Help! I’m getting repeated requests to log in! I post, then jump to another forum, and try to post…and I have to log in anew. Worse, it sometimes takes two or more tries for me to log in! I enter my name and password, it says “Thank you” and then opens the name and password screen again! Once, it did this five times in a row! In this current session, I’ve posted three or four times…and had to log in all over before each post.
Wazzup?
Same here. Repeated log in requests. Tiresome.
Ok today, a few times when I refreshed a forum, I got a list of posts where the latest post was 7 or 8 am (UTC+8) when the real time was 3 or 4 pm. I thought it was my computer being lazy and serving a cached file instead of refreshing. But when I clicked New Posts on a different computer (around 10 pm), I only got 3 threads, also updated around 7 or 8 am.