Archives

Please excuse any glitches when you load pages because I will be tinkering with the templates in the next few days.

Okay, be gentile. How is it?

i like it, its more friendly for those who haven't visted cleanmpg before. The news items are much easier to read rather than having to click a link to read them.

Hi Tom:

___We have some work to do with all that spacing thing again … I will see you in chat tomorrow.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Okay, be gentile. How is it?

Tom,

Gentle it is. :)

I-Love-It :Banane10:
Terry (tiger)

Hi Tom:

___We have some work to do with all that spacing thing again … I will see you in chat tomorrow.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Yup. We need to reformat how we want to do news. I'll be around.

I was expecting something like Austin Powers Official Site. :p

I'm not completely thrilled yet. The top part with the ads looks very busy and takes away from the logo. Maybe the ads could be stacked down the left column instead?

Hi Tom:

___The site is really coming around ;)

___I have another request … Some of the web sites I visit have these nice looking icons whereas we are showing the VBulletin based one in IE 7. Can you change this to show the CleanMPG logo instead?

___The following is a screen shot of my browser to give you an idea as to what I am speaking of …

http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/500/Web_Site_Icons.jpg

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Tom,

Just wanted to say the appearance here has been substantially upgraded. :)

Oops, now searching the forums doesn't seem to work if
you're not logged in -- just brings me back to the same
search form. Is this intentional? I submit that searching
should work under any circumstances, because people who
haven't necessarily signed up can still find a ton of useful
stuff here. Suppose I advised someone "oh, go to cleanmpg.com
and look for everything posted by hobbit" -- which in fact
I do myself, as a way to quickly catch up on anyone who might
have followed on to something I posted. Please make this
functionality back the way it was if it's changed somehow,
because it's really handy to do this from some joe random
browser without logging in and messing with passwords in an
untrusted environment.
.
_H*

I will look into it. I don't think I changed anything with the search function.

I just confirmed it. You are right, it is broken for non logged in users. They should have access, but for some reason searches don't work for them. I'll look for a fix tomorrow.

Okay. Guest searches should now be working.

They are working now, but they're also asking for typein of the
contents of an image. I've never seen *that* on a bboard before,
but more importantly I'm COMING AT THIS WITH A TEXT BROWSER.
.
Is there really that great a concern about "search bombing"?
What are the risks? Have you seen any actual problem with this
here, and/or heard about it in regard to other forums? Isn't
the time-throttling sufficient [which is still annoying to me, but
liveable, as the bboard responds to a search by doing a *redirect*
and then donks me on a timeout if I follow it right away].
.
_H*

They are working now, but they're also asking for type in of the
contents of an image. I've never seen *that* on a bboard before,
but more importantly I'm COMING AT THIS WITH A TEXT BROWSER.
.
Is there really that great a concern about "search bombing"?
What are the risks? Have you seen any actual problem with this
here, and/or heard about it in regard to other forums? Isn't
the time-throttling sufficient [which is still annoying to me, but
liveable, as the bboard responds to a search by doing a *redirect*
and then donks me on a timeout if I follow it right away].
.
_H*

Yes. That is exactly why it exists. We may not be that big now, but once we start getting noticed (and as you know we just recently had our first spammer) There is a good likelihood that a DOS could be successful with searches from multiple IPs could in fact lock up the database and create a DOS.

You make a valid point about trying to read from a text browser. I don't know what we can do to make it work for valid text browsers other than to have people with text browsers register.

Any ideas? Should I just get rid of image verification until it becomes a problem?

Well ... I don't have a good feel for how much CPU/disk thrashing
a nice deep search does, so I don't know the risk level we're
talking about. Given the time throttling, an attacker would have
to come from multiple IP addresses to really hose things up, right?
And the image seems to not come into play for logged-in users [unless
I haven't checked recently enough?] ... hard to say. I would think
efforts to proactively prevent total takeover of the board would
trump worrying about search resource-consumption, though. It was
pretty disturbing seeing what happened to priuschat a while back,
and camrychat more recently. I think camrychat was down with
the "you are owned" message for several days.
.
_H*

It is a tough balance. I don't want to be so secure that it interferes with the user base, but on the other hand I want to put as much in place that we can avoid potential problems.