Xenforo conversion thread ( ES 2.0 )

[neptronix]

Had another recurrence of alibaba bots - this time trying a new tactic. Same case as before - masquerading as a legitimate user and not following the robots.txt rules.
Server got so choked up that i couldn't even remote into it to see what was going on.

A few restarts, some analysis on their pattern, some new rules, i got em trapped...



Hopefully there's no round 2 left in them, haha..

 

[neptronix]

Quite the battle last night. After cutting the new hydra head off alibaba, a new challenger appeared.

These IP blocks in Vietnam had 1000's of IP addresses and a very good IP rotation schedule. It's a covert operation ( randomizes it's browser identifiers on each hit ) designed around my DDOS protection system. The problem was that they were hitting PHP, and PHPBB is freakin' slow. And also, robots.txt specifically forbids scraping it.



I'm glad they weren't able to take the site down, but wow, i need a bigger gun.

ES 1.0 is now offline to the general public, and only available by special request. It's way too much of a headache to support.

 

[riba2233]

Wow that's a pretty shitty situation.

 

[neptronix]

Yeah. What bugs me is how difficult it is to keep an independent website online in the current year, when things like this are lurking about.

I worry about the independent web at large when i see this kind of activity. The bar of systems administration + web development skill keeps going up as time goes on.


On the other end of the coin..


Just as i thought, Alibaba was training an open source AI model:

I tried this AI model last night and was very impressed so far.
Good performance from mid powered hardware ( 8 core cpu + nvidia 4070 )
I could get it to write some advanced code that worked.
We may use this at the dev shop. maybe one day we write server defenses with this AI..

At least we got something out of this server hassle, but it would be a lot cooler if these companies scraped more respectfully!

 

[neptronix]

Howdy folks.

We finally got feedback from new editors on our knowledgebase software, Zeropress, and noticed some clunk/bugs in the editing interface. It's important to us that the editing interface is at least good so that people are encouraged to contribute, and also have a good time doing it.

Most of this clunk is due to the fact that we're using a mid-shelf WYWIWYG editor that costs $800 for a one-time license instead of a top-shelf option that costs $3/month per user ( fiscally impossible for ES ).

Our list of bugs to fix ( en route ):




In addition to this, it seems our WYSIWYG editor now supports AI editing assistance, given that you host your own AI hardware, which we don't, because it's been frickin' expensive until lately.

I'm looking into what the cost of appropriate hardware would be to integrate some light AI to help editors out.

More later!

 

[E-HP]

I think I mentioned this on another post a while back, regarding access to forum features being different between platforms (pc, tablet, laptop). At the time I used an example of the member’s signature not appearing on their posts when viewed by phone, because I had referred someone to a link in my signature, and they could see it. Yesterday I was reading the thread for OSF for the TSDZ8, and a post by stancecoke, and he mentioned flipping his phone to landscape mode, and the signature appears. I tried it and it worked. It wasn’t intuitive for me, since I rarely hold my phone in landscape mode unless it’s for taking a pic. That was the only feature that I previously couldn’t find on my phone (a lot are in the drop down menu when using the phone), so I guess they’re all there. I don’t really see an easy way to raise awareness, or that it matters. Just a quirk.

 

[amberwolf]

Seems wierd that it would *add* vertical-real-estate-using stuff in the mode that has less of that.

 

[E-HP]

I don’t recall seeing any other web pages that add/remove stuff just by rotating the screen and back.

 

[amberwolf]

I don't know if there are any, as I never use my phone as a browser (because I couldn't read it if I did )

 

[afzal]

I think I mentioned this on another post a while back, regarding access to forum features being different between platforms (pc, tablet, laptop). At the time I used an example of the member’s signature not appearing on their posts when viewed by phone,

Yesterday I was reading the thread for OSF for the TSDZ8, and a post by stancecoke, and he mentioned flipping his phone to landscape mode, and the signature appears. I tried it and it worked.

I don’t really see an easy way to raise awareness, or that it matters. Just a quirk.

+1

Seems this is a Xenforo issue, the same problem is observed on another forum using Xenforo.

In the mobile browser (Firefox Android), selecting "Desktop site" too makes signature visible

 

[neptronix]

That's a Xenforo design feature.
Some of these signatures would make pages 33-50% longer on mobile, requiting a ton more scrolling.

I agree with it being a default.. i think if i designed a feature where you could click a button to see a signature on mobile, only a few people would use it.