Hardware Failure

[Dan]

This morning our main server, Eclair, had a rather large hardware failure causing the site to go down with most of the services we run.

We have since switched on the fail over, running the fourms from Lumiere. Unfortuntely Lumiere was not quite ready for this so things might get rather buggy and other services like the blog and wiki will still be down.

There support people in the data center are working on getting Eclair back online and we hope to be up and running soon.


Update: Everything should be coming back up now. Depending on your DNS it could take a litte bit for the domain name records to update before you can use the blog and some other services.

[Dan]

It seems one bug is that uploading and download files is a bit messed up right now.

The downloaded files might contain jibish or html.

[Firestorrmm]

you were right, Josh . . . this is one of the most helpful stickies yet.

visit your manufacturers website if you have problems with your hardware beyond our expertise.

great job, bro

[Insectoid]

^ confused?

[Tony]

A bot, apparently from Russia. I'm guessing the way it works is that it grabs posts from other users in other forums that match some keywords, to build up a post-count. It would then throw up a spam link into account's signature, and likely go unnoticed, as those would be old posts.

Of course the only signatures that show up in the logged-out mode are Dan's and mine

[ProgrammingFun]

Tony @ Thu Aug 12, 2010 2:52 pm wrote:

Of course the only signatures that show up in the logged-out mode are Dan's and mine

Is that a default setting in the ACP?
And does reCAPTCHA help against spambots as opposed to the normal phpBB CAPTCHA?

I know this is a late post...

[Tony]

ProgrammingFun @ Tue Dec 21, 2010 7:41 pm wrote:

Is that a default setting in the ACP?

I don't believe so. Dan has been making a lot of custom implementations.

ProgrammingFun @ Tue Dec 21, 2010 7:41 pm wrote:

And does reCAPTCHA help against spambots as opposed to the normal phpBB CAPTCHA?

Quick lesson in how CAPTCHA works -- it never _stops_ spam for being spam, it merely adds a _cost_ to it. If a CAPTCHA is easily solved by a computer, that cost goes down back to near $0. If it requires a human to solve it, then the cost (if I remember correctly) is around $0.001 per CAPTCHA. Depending on how the economics work, the spam either turns a profit and continues, or it doesn't... in which case someone tries to figure out how to reduce costs.

[ProgrammingFun]

I meant to ask if reCAPTCHA is harder to solve (for bots) than the normal CAPTCHA.

[Tony]

likely. mARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME

[Insectoid]

bahaha, /b/ makes me laugh sometimes. But not often.

[ProgrammingFun]

Tony @ Tue Dec 21, 2010 11:37 pm wrote:

likely. mARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME

PRO...