Those funny-looking letters and numbers you have to enter to access some functions on certain websites. The idea is that it’s easy (relatively) for a human to read them, but very difficult for OCR software.
Is it possible to enforce the two minute search rule/capcha and the 60 second post rule for people with less then a certain amount of posts?
Say guests with under 100 posts and members with under 50 posts or something like that?
It seems to me that once a person pays up and starts contributing to the board, they’re not likely to spam it as well.
Yeah, I can never remember if Google fired five shots, or six.
Stranger
but it’ll blow your head clean off.
Oh that! Developed at my alma mater!
Guests cannot search. Only members can.
Edited: changed my mind.
I don’t get any of these cryptic comments.
Jerry or Ed or Tuba or somebody, please come into this thread and give us some context and history for these statements.
Right now they have a “you need to taste your breast milk so we know it’s not explosive” bureaucratic over-the-topness about them.
Right, I forgot about that.
How the hell do you “abuse” a search function?
What about hitting “New Posts”-does that count?
I was trying to ask that just before the boards went down. It might not be “abusers” at all. It does count as a search to use the “New Posts” function.
Does that even work?
So unless we get more details we have to assume that whatever hardware you have in place can’t deal with someone doing a DOS attack on you with member accounts based on a search limit of 30 sec’s so you are now increasing it to 2 min’s.
May I remind you that you’re not doing us a favour. We pay for this place. We pay for a service. I don’t really care if you work for the Reader or the SDMB. I also work in the IT field and this IMO is a bustass solution to a problem. If there is a hole in the software then patch it or upgrade it.
If the only problem is that some fuckers are fucking up the system by using the search function every 30 secs by creating member accounts(which they have to pay for) and then automating a search every 30 seconds, then I’m sorry but you need to throw more hardware at the problem. This is really showing you up IMO.
Only members can search. This seems to be fundamentally based in a lack of infrastructure to me and not a problem based in the software.
WTF am I paying for? Shit or get off the pot, chaps. Provide a service that is stable or stop pretending that this is a professional organisation. If member accounts can take you down be just searching every 30 seconds you’re a bustass organisation.
It’s not really likely that one individual can tie a server up in searches, but three or four people constantly searching on a set of common four letter words and given that vBulletin seems to allow an old-fashioned linear search, well it is possible to degrade performance badly. And I think that the Administrator here is implying that there is more than one person involved.
Using accounts that they have paid for within a restricted time frame. Even if it’s malicious it still shows that this place is being run on bad low level hardware that can’t deal with what they ask paying members to work with.
Or there’s a hole in the software that allows DOS attacks from non-member accounts. It doesn’t sound like that though as members are being restricted.
What do you want to bet that the searches were all prompted by this thread?
Damn it, why does something like this always happen around subscription renewal time?
Well they are using message board software that isn’t exactly bullet-proof. Mind you, I’m not convinced that vBulletin makes it easy to back stuff up. It doesn’t seem to be enterprise class software in any case, but is there actually any MB software that is?
Strange, I had the same thought.
You know, the door is --------------------------------->
I get tired of people acting like just because they pay money, they have a right to a certain level of service. If you don’t like what you are getting, leave. If you would like something changed, ask nicely. In the meantime, assume that you don’t know all the facts, and don’t expect that you ever will. And, again, if you don’t like that fact, the door is right over there. :dubious: