TF Views

EDIT 4-28-13, 7:41pm PDT...

I've put in more countermeasures which means I'm bringing guest search and New User Registration back online. The new countermeasures should limit attacks and spammers at the same time.

Please let me know if there are any unusual situations, problems, issues, any of that sort of thing encountered in using the forums.

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EDIT 4-25-13, 11:37am PDT...

I have heard back from support and it confirms what I thought was going on, we are not the intended victims of attacks, we are merely using software that is drawing a global attack, and I've taken even more security steps to rebuff them. See post #10 for more.

User registration should be coming back online next week.

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EDIT 4-21-13, 5:15pm PDT...

I haven't heard back from support. You may have noticed we got slammed all day, and are not yet sure why. I have 3 tickets into 3 departments, but this is looking like a coordinated attack on the server. Originally I was led to believe by support that it was load imbalance from our use, but I'm beginning to find that entirely wrong-headed given the amount of users we have. I've taken some more advanced security steps for now while I wait to hear back from support on this issue, and will be leaving new user registration and guest search offline for the time being as extreme security precautions.

The system has come back online pretty strong for now, but who knows. Bottom line, save any crucial posts to your PC before posting them. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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See 2nd post for details on new user registration.



Original post:
Site is having issues, back up posts before sending


Not sure what's going on, I have support looking into it, I think someone else on the server is pulling some BS on the machine (possibly on our DB server, not even our main web server), possibly another user on the server screwing around trying to put scripts in that don't run properly.

Anyway, I have support looking into it, but for now if you have major posts, I suggest copying them to notepad before submitting in case there's a problem sending to the server.

Sorry about that.

So it turns out the problem user on the server is us. Aside from an image search drawing in a lot of traffic (I've changed the IMG tags to URLs, and may just remove them altogether if that doesn't help), I've temporarily deactivated new user registration until we can get the errant systems in check.

If you know of someone who wants to join the forums while registration is down, contact me or give them the email-me address attached to my account and I will add them.


I've also disabled all search for guests while we get things worked out. My apologies for the inconvenience, but it's for the integrity of the site.

Hmmm. I wonder if one of the recent images I posted is the one that was drawing the attention.

You fool! You and your shameless promotion of my self-assigned arch-nemesis have doomed us all!

Metrotitan is your nemesis?

Oh, I was blaming your semi-recent posting of David Willis comics. The Metro-shoop didn't even occur to me.

Oh yeah. I did put that there. Huh.

You're all wrong! It was none of those, ha ha ha ha! It was this one from 2 years ago:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=687&start=50

Anime kills.


I doubt this was the chief problem though, it just happened to be a singular standout draw that shouldn't be there, so I figured I'd alter it on the off chance it was causing the high demand. More than likely something else is going on, spammers trying to pound our site with bots to register just so they can drop a single spam-deuce on here and leave and the link gets picked up by google is my best estimation at this point.


BTW, for those interested, Google delivers us most of the traffic on this site, 30 times as much traffic as the next source, Bing. And here are the top 5 search results that lead to our site:
tfviews (4 times as many results as the next one)
masterpiece thundercracker
masterpiece acid storm
transformers comics
masterpiece thundercracker review

That's interesting. I usually just go to the site by typing in the URL. (I have a habit of not keeping bookmarks if I expect I won't be on a computer for too long; I don't have any kind of bookmark-keeping programs installed or anything.)

New update at the first post. Bottom line, I have burned my whole day on this nonsense, fighting tooth and nail to keep us online with no support from the host.