16/12/2013
Some of you might have noticed that the site has, at times, been a little unstable over the past 5 weeks. At first we thought this was faulty ram but it seems that a lot of Chinese spammers have instead been having fun trying to break through the anti-spam defences on our content system. The result is that our traffic has jumped well above normal levels and, even if they don't manage to post a comment, the extra load from each attempt is still difficult to tackle.
In order to manage this we’ve had to penalise some legitimate search engine traffic from non-UK countries to reduce critical load and then introduce a number of tougher server-level restrictions against country-specific IP ranges and known spam agents (robot IDs). As ever tackling spam remains a constant battle, much as it has always been. We seem to have got most of the problem under control now but it's something that we're always monitoring.
Otherwise most of our time is being spent upon the construction of new content and planning for various system upgrades (forum, jargon system etc.) next year. The next major update will be to our ISP Listings database first thing next year and we plan to add a few extras during that process.. but more on that later.
Hope you all have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Some of you might have noticed that the site has, at times, been a little unstable over the past 5 weeks. At first we thought this was faulty ram but it seems that a lot of Chinese spammers have instead been having fun trying to break through the anti-spam defences on our content system. The result is that our traffic has jumped well above normal levels and, even if they don't manage to post a comment, the extra load from each attempt is still difficult to tackle.
In order to manage this we’ve had to penalise some legitimate search engine traffic from non-UK countries to reduce critical load and then introduce a number of tougher server-level restrictions against country-specific IP ranges and known spam agents (robot IDs). As ever tackling spam remains a constant battle, much as it has always been. We seem to have got most of the problem under control now but it's something that we're always monitoring.
Otherwise most of our time is being spent upon the construction of new content and planning for various system upgrades (forum, jargon system etc.) next year. The next major update will be to our ISP Listings database first thing next year and we plan to add a few extras during that process.. but more on that later.
Hope you all have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year.