Pandas, spam, and a few updates in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

Hope your summer is going well — and isn’t too crazily hot. Mochi and I made the move to TX at the height of the pandemic last year, and I thought we were the ones with the terrible summers. All in due time, I suppose..

Alrighty, first I wanted to give y’all (do you like it? i’m trying it out) a heads up that I’ve been seeing a strange server issue over the last few days. For reasons as yet unknown, the server CPU has been almost maxing out again — the first time that’s happened in a few years.

So I’ll ask: have any of you seen the panda in the last few days? If so, do you remember the time of day it happened? The developer and I have our deerstalker hats on, but any leads you might be able to provide would be helpful.

Worst case scenario, we can beef up the server and this will be a non-issue, but I’d like to get to bottom of it now rather than kicking the can down the road.

One possible theory I have is that this could be related to the ever-growing influx of spam we’re seeing lately — something I’ve been working to cut down on.

This leads me to my next item of discussion: In the next month or two, I will be rolling out a few changes that will make it considerably harder for spam users to create new accounts.

First, new users will be required to verify their email address is a real one before they can fully join the site. Next, I intend to add a 3 day waiting period (still nailing down the exact length of time, this may change) before new users can comment on other users’ entries or post their own public entries. I’m hoping this will not only cut down on spam, it will cut down on users creating new accounts specifically to keep arguments going after they’ve been banned by another user.

Finally, I’m happy to share that Entry Search and Diary Export are both fully functional once again! Hopefully these both are now fixed permanently, the developer put a considerable amount of time into rewriting their architecture.

That’s all I’ve got for now, will write more soon about some upcoming features and changes.

Before I go, though, here are some shots from my travels with Mochi:

<3,
-J