Tag: Problems

Forum, users, spammers, bans, demotivators.

It’s nice to have many registered users. It’s nice to have them coming, joining and participating. It’s nice to have a raising graph. It’s nice to have nice users.

It’s not not nice to deal with SPAM. After the SPAM storm during the last two days, I finally looked into the user database and this is the result:

  • Deleted 500+ awaiting activation accounts
  • Banned 250+ users
  • Half of online users in the past 24 hours were in fact spammers (if you are registered you can see their account struckthrough).
  • 300+ profiles were thoroughly checked also against the “known spammers” database
  • Upgraded the forum software
  • Added plug-ins, tweaked configuration
  • Spent more than one day of my life on that crap

Is it gonna help? At least I’ve learnt a thing or two and will keep an eye on more details than used to before. Yeah, more work, less fun. Speaking of demotivators…

Oh, yeah… If you find your account blocked and you think that it happened by mistake, or or if you cannot register, drop me a mail or ask in the chat.

Facebook – end of story

Updated on Jul 20, 2011 @01:44:

Even Atsuko Kudo was deleted! Unbelievable… Facebook admins (or managers?) are idiots…

Thanks to @Overchief

Updated on Jul 19, 2011 @13:00:

Nevertheless I decided to give Facebook another chance. I registered under a pretty existing name, created a company page, even activated my nick using my cell phone, acquired ~650 friends (almost two times less then earlier). And guess what? Yesterday my account was deleted again.

This time I’m not going to ask for the reason, I do not care. Facebook proved to be absolutely useless. Not many visits, no conversations, no comments. Much-much less than during my first FB period. Users “disappear” faster than “reappear”. Just huge Firefox load.

I think Facebook has passed the peak of popularity. The popularity I can not explain. So far only two social networks continue to “deliver”: professional LinkedIn (mostly used in US and NL) and LiveJournal (in RU). Tumbler is good for finding new photos, Twitter for breaking news and live events.

Continue reading “Facebook – end of story”

Facebook is down

Facebook is down since 20-30 minutes ago. That may affect performance worldwide. For example, the “Like” buttons are actually frames with content downloaded from Facebook. And since it’s down, such buttons will delay the page downloading.

Another side effect is Twitter, which is overloaded and even down in some countries. What a chain reaction…

See also Like Ra on social networks

Any problems accessing the site?

Updated on Apr 08, 2011 @ 01:50:

Just seen in the news – there were two more massive DDoS attacks on LiveJournal – on Apr 04 and Apr 07.

Updated on Apr 06, 2011 @ 17:23:

LiveJournal slowdowns do closely correlate with the Free CDN performance issues. I disabled using the CDN – the attached images should download much faster now.

Posted on Mar 31, 2011 @ 00:37:

Continue reading “Any problems accessing the site?”

Bad performance. Indirectly affected by the DDoS attack?

The periodical outages, blackouts and slowdowns could be caused by the latest massive DDoS attack on WordPress.

On the bright side, in order to mitigate the performance issues I tweaked the design again what dramatically decreased the load time.

Or… Hmm… Was it only me who noticed all of that???

Crash happens…

The virtual server was down for several hours today. The reason is – the system refused to boot up. A ticket to the service providers plus chasing them plus some restoration work finally solved the issue.

Just for your information: I noticed that every day between 12:00 and 13:00 GMT the system is overloaded and refuses connections. I suspect that it’s caused by a host server backup or any other routine maintenance.

SPAM, blackout, overload, missing comments and captcha

There was another blackout. The official reason – excessive SPAM led to CPU/memory overload and overusage.

Not sure if it indeed was the problem (I think it was overloaded MySQL), but the amount of SPAM the site has been getting since October last year is crazy (see the graph). Blocking IP’s does help a bit, but I’m afraid I will have to block the whole Internet over a couple of years.

As you may have noticed, Continue reading “SPAM, blackout, overload, missing comments and captcha”