ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of VF

[donnamp]

Thanks, Kat! I will hold off -

[kat_b]

Let's see what happens with the new forum/new location. If an IP address had multiple hits and information pulled I've looked to see if it's in a blacklist database and blocked those offenders. Part of that number is indeed likely not people who are really interested in our content (maybe they are instead seeking to spam post), but that number is tolerable as long as they aren't scraping. And, because you don't have to be a member to visit, just to post, I don't want to block people who aren't registered and are legitimately looking for information.

[loulou]

Thank you, Kat.

[Gemini2874]

Thank you so much, Kat and team!! I appreciate all of your hard work and effort!!!

[cataddict]

Quick post to thank Kat B (love the new avatar pic, BTW) and all those who are working to keep our forum alive and functioning and improving!

[txhsmom]

Thank you Kat & others!

Carol

[ChelePA]

Originally Posted by cataddict

Quick post to thank Kat B (love the new avatar pic, BTW) and all those who are working to keep our forum alive and functioning and improving!

Yes!!!! Thank you

[firmaniac]

Thank you from me, too! I got logged in! Yay!

[FitBoop]

Originally Posted by kat_b

To move to the latest iteration of vBulletin we first need to upgrade this version to a minimum of 3.8.11 (we're at 3.8.3 right now), so if you see things looking weird in the next week or so it's because I turned off some customizations to do that, and do intend to add them back afterward.

I owe an apology to a few of you. To resolve CPU/500 errors I rushed to block IP addresses to protect us from being crawled (one bot alone has scraped over 2.5GBs of data the past few months ) and from brute attacks and caught a few of our more loyal visitors in that. It should be resolved now.

Thank you, Kat!

What does it mean that the bots caught visitors? Will the new VF site be configured to avoid scraping by bots and AI?

[kat_b]

Originally Posted by FitBoop

What does it mean that the bots caught visitors? Will the new VF site be configured to avoid scraping by bots and AI?

I was blocking IP addresses that had a lot of hits, so a high probability of either crawling, trying to do a brute force attack, or trying to register a spam account. I did a rough swipe to start because I wanted the CPU to stop maxing out, then went back and refined that list by cross-referencing the IPs I'd blocked to a blacklist IP database. Wendy has a robots.txt file in place, but a lot of these bad entities ignore that directive.

The team feels it's best to move into the vBulletin cloud. That means that vBulletin company will be responsible for keeping the application up to date and performing all the server security and maintenance, including watching out for bots and bad entitites. We'll see what else we can do to block crawlers, but as a public site I don't think there is a foolproof way to stop all of that.