Wapsi Square Forum

I'm intending to move the forum Sunday, March 7th. No specific time yet.

What I'll be doing is locking this one, so it's read-only, then setting it up as read-write on the new home. There'll be an IP change in there.

Once that's done, then I can start trying to figure out a better CAPTCHA type system, and go through and purge out all of the Russian spammers.

Good luck with all that! Over on Deviant Art, various of the Favbots and scammers have accounts 8 years old (so it says) and only start acting up recently. Whack-A-Mole time!

Any way we’ll know the move has been made?

Well, it hasn't started yet. (I can tell because this posts.)

(And still - or maybe again - edits at 7:36 mountain time)

Hopefully it won't matter much. Basically, if you can't post, you're on the 'old' server. When you can post, you'll be on the new one. I haven't done it yet - I was up too darned late last night, and I need to get under my car and check a leaky hose.

I hate when that happens. (Leaky hoses.)

Unfortunately, it appears that phpBB didn't think it was important to have a 'lock forum' feature. Their attitude is "Just edit all of the individual forums and lock them, edit permissions, etc, then you can put them back later."

So I'm just going to dump, restore, and change DNS.

This is the updated forum, on an up to date host.

I'm still fighting the phpbb gallery plugin- it was working, then it suddenly started throwing an error. I'll work on it more later, I'm tired with all of the fighting and upgrading.

I had to go from 3.2.5 to 3.2.11, then upgrade that to 3.3.3, then fight with extensions that refused to update - and then an extension provided _with_ phpBB 3.3.3 that it turns out hates the most recent PHP. Not to mention the back and forth combat with phpbb gallery, and the recaptcha plugin.

We'll know in a few days if the reCAPTCHA 3 I enabled fixes the spammer problem. If it does, then I can get Paul to push to get more people on the forum(s) again.

I admin a fairly large music forum and there is no way to block all the spammers. I just go through the registration attempts each day, look up the IP block and ban it.

I'm up to over 1400 address blocks from Russia. If only countries had been given nice big blocks.

If only ARIN would actually give you _all_ of the blocks assigned to a country.

I may have to try to find a list somewhere to add to here. Virtually every spammer here is coming from far Eastern Europe or Western Asia.

In addition, the forum now has HTTPS. the main wapsi square site will get https as soon as I move it as well.

There'll be yet _another_ move, but it'll be just to new hardware, I won't have to rebuild everything from scratch.

Bookworm wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 12:07 pm If only ARIN would actually give you _all_ of the blocks assigned to a country.

I may have to try to find a list somewhere to add to here. Virtually every spammer here is coming from far Eastern Europe or Western Asia.

Check out the lists at https://www.ipdeny.com/ - you can download IP-block lists for individual countries, in a couple of different forms. The data is pretty easily converted into formats which can be used with database lookups, ipfw rulesets

I've been using these files for several years, to provision blocking filters for my mail servers and Asterisk voicemail system. it makes a huge difference.

The most efficient way I've found, is to take each country file, and convert it into a format which can be processed by the Linux "ipset restore" command for an ipset in "hash:net" mode. For each such country-based ipset I create a "--match-set" iptables entry with a DROP destination in an iptables rule, and I call this rule for incoming TCP SYN packet.

Voila. My server "no longer exists" for TCP connections initiated from those countries... the SYN packets just vanish like snowflakes on a hot griddle. Ditto for VoIP packets (those take a match-on-my-UDP-port filter to dispatch to the "countries" blocklist).

I imagine you could download the ipdeny aggregated lists for countries of concern, munge the entries into the right forms, and import them into phpBB in bulk, if you want to block at the phpBB level. Or, do as I've done - turn them into ipset hash lists and drop the packets when they come in.

If you'd like a copy of my (rather ugly) processing scripts, drop me a PM and let me know where to upload them.

I'll have to think about it. One of the issues is that some of the folks I host do business with Europe and Asia. (None with the Russian Federation states, that I know of, but it's hard to say)

Bookworm wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 5:28 pm I'll have to think about it. One of the issues is that some of the folks I host do business with Europe and Asia. (None with the Russian Federation states, that I know of, but it's hard to say)

I have tried using these lists, but spammers seem to move on. One issue has been cheap or trial server space in other countries.
Yes, I can't block the whole server, because there a businesses on there that trade all over the world.

One thing I do as revenge, is that I don't check the IP address until the very end of the registration process.

The most obvious thing I'm sure everyone has noticed is that some of our avatars have disappeared. Any possible reason for that, and any possible cure?

_Might_ be related to phpgallery being removed, added, removed, added, etc to try to get a running version of it. However, I don't recall avatars actually being stored in there.

I'll try to check a bit later. I do still have the entire 'old' forum intact, so they should still be there. I did all the upgrades and abuse on the new system.

Can you give me two or three people as examples so I can go digging?

The only user whose avatar I haven't seen show up is TazManiac.

Mine disappeared, so I put up a new one.

Sarge’s had disappeared this AM, but is back?

Okay, posting to see if my Avatar is still available...

-edit- Well, I still see a 'Once in a Blue Moon' pick-chure.

I do not see Taz's or Sarge's avatar. I've made an effort to clear caches - managed to crash my file browser several times in the process, apparently it relies on some of those caches not being emptied while it's running.