We're back! in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

Wow was that a stressful morning! It’s never fun to wake up to a panda infestation, let alone on a work day. But, thankfully we were able to get back up and running relatively quickly.

So, what happened? Well, we’re still figuring that out. The moment things were back up and running, I told the developer to get back to his dayjob. Initial investigation points to some code we had in place that helps make managing subscriptions easier. We removed it for now to get things back up and running, but it doesn’t actually break anything — I’ll just have to click a few more things every day. I can definitely do that until we figure out a way to get back to normal without things breaking.

In the meantime: Well hello there!

First off, I’ll go ahead and address the elephant in the room: Yes I am still here. Though I haven’t had a public presence for quite a while, I’ve been working quietly in the background to keep an eye on things, both on the community and on the health of the site. 

Lately I’ve of course had my eye on the absurd number of spammers that keep popping up. Wow is it getting bad! I know it’s really frustrating for those of you that use the front page, and I’m sorry for that.

What’s equally frustrating from an admin perspective is that they seem to be getting worse despite my trying a variety of different anti-spam solutions – multiple types of captchas for sign up, email verification for new users, limits on posting by new users, IP ban lists, an attempt to automatically detect the posting style of bots, yelling at each of the spammers individually in a fit of rage (really), a bunch of things. So far, nothing has been a silver bullet.

Equally frustrating (for me at least!), when I go into the system behind the curtain to delete the spam accounts manually, due to our occasionally creaky system (love ya SM) it can take up to a minute to delete each spammer. If I try to do several at once? 50/50 shot of it working or the server slapping me with a panda. The situation: not ideal.

So, why oh why is this happening? Well, let’s take a step back for a moment and unpack why spammers post on Prosebox at all. Why is it that they desperately want to tell you about how you can use a Brand New 2023 Catalytic Convertor to Solve Your Solar Instragram Needs? It’s a numbers game. They hire cheap teams of programmers to write scripts that spam posts on sites like this one across the internet. And, because Prosebox is an older site with lots of fresh, organic (read: written by humans) content, it shows up pretty high on the results list when you do a Google search for something like “Solar Catalytic Convertors”. Rinse and repeat.

If you look around the internet today you’ll notice that a lot of the older sites — especially places like forums — are facing similar problems. Or, well, they’re gone now because it got overwhelming. It’s an arms race, and it’s escalated exponentially over the last few years.

Ok, what can be done? Well, there are a few things that we’re working on.

First, the ability to click a button and report an account as spam. I know some of you have found it controversial when I’ve previously brought up this functionality because it has the potential for abuse. At this point, I think it’s a risk we have to take. I intend for it to be built in such a way that it will be very difficult to abuse, and if the abuse happens anyway, we’ll adjust it to make it harder. But we need it.

Next, limiting the ability for new accounts to post publicly for 7 days, and limiting the ability to comment publicly on other user’s entries for a similar amount of time. Hopefully that will reduce the incentive enough to slow them down.

Finally, there are a lot of things that I’ve been doing behind the scenes to clean up the mess of spammers, and I intend to keep going down that path. I know the spam looks really bad these days, but I promise you it could be so much worse. A lot of this work is me playing detective — digging into the database to see if there are trends with the email addresses or usernames that are used and then deleting huge swaths of users, that kind of thing. It’s an ugly job, but it’s oddly satisfying when you can eliminate a few hundred spammer jerks with a few lines of code.

I’ve also been keeping a close eye on server performance lately. There have been sporadic reports of panda sightings. A few weeks ago when this kept happening, I took the step of upgrading the server’s processing power substantially, so hopefully it’ll happen less. There was a not insignificant impact on operating cost there, but given the subsequent reduction in panda sightings, I say it was worth every penny.

And, well, that’s about it in terms of what’s going on lately! Other than the occasional hiccup the site remains stable, and even with the increased operating costs, Prosebox is in good shape financially. Once things are a bit steadier with the spam, more features will be coming. And yes, I will do my best to post more. Special shout out to the user that has been poking me almost daily for the last two weeks to write something. You now owe me the $5 you promised me. Yes it’s $5 now.

But okay, enough about the site. I know the real reason you’re all here.

MOCHI CATCHUP TIME!

Exploring the redwoods

Contemplation

Mochi in our new home!

<3,
-J

Last updated September 29, 2022