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  • If you were supposed to get an email from the forum but didn't (e.g. to verify your account for registration), email Wes at [email protected] or talk to me on Discord for help. Sometimes the server hits our limit of emails we can send per hour.
  • Get in our Discord chat! Discord.gg/stararmy
  • 📅 May and June 2024 are YE 46.4 in the RP.

Working to Keep Star Army Fast

Okay, so this is kind of a grab bag of notes from your friendly webmaster to keep you informed of what's going on. On October 25th, our site traffic drastically rose. This wasn't because we got a video made about us by Spacedock or The Templin Institute or were linked on Reddit, it was a rush of mysterious bot traffic from Singapore that increased traffic by over 40%, slowing down the server and causing intermittent outages. We also ran out of disk space. In response, I shelled out the cash to upgrade the server to a new higher-tier plan with twice the RAM and twice the disk space, which has made the site much faster.

Fig A: Traffic Jump

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Fig B: Unusual Traffic From Singapore

1699149823182.png

Well, the bots were back at it again tonight. The bots out of this Alibaba datacenter seem to be looking at images which makes me wonder if they're using them to train an AI. I used our Cloudflare to basically give the country of Singapore a challenge page when visiting the site to stop the bots because they were taking up too much of our resources. If you live there I apologize but this was necessary. I also saw the disk space was nearing being full again despite the doubled capacity so I started looking around and found the huge amount of visits had caused Dokuwiki's cache files to bloat so I cleared those and the media attic.

While examining log files I found that the Dokuwiki plugin "loadskin" which let us switch wiki styles was super outdated (no updates in like 15 years) and generated 2 PHP warnings on every page view and the sheer amount of writes to this log about it could be slowing the server down too so I've filed a issue on the plugin's GitHub and temporarily disabled the plugin. I apologize to you folks who used the alternate skins.

For similar, less severe, reasons, I've also disabled DokuSIOC.

I'm doing my best to keep the site in top shape for everyone. If you have any suggestions or comments, I'm always happy to listen to your feedback.
 
Click to expand...
My personal proxy servers are in LA/Seattle, so few of those China hits are me.The only way I can access the clear Internet, though I am thinking of trying to find another solution since a lot of sites like to block them recently. Likely how the program is working.
 
demibear said:
My personal proxy servers are in LA/Seattle, so few of those China hits are me.The only way I can access the clear Internet, though I am thinking of trying to find another solution since a lot of sites like to block them recently. Likely how the program is working.
Click to expand...
It's okay for people to use proxies and VPNs to get to SARP, as long as they're behaving! It's these overly aggressive bot crawlers that are the issue bothering us lately.

- - -

Since I'm talking about changes to the wiki I'm going to lump some notes in with this:
  • UTF-8 is now supported in Dokuwiki pagenames so you can name pages things like 邪馬台_の_星軍隊 or possibly even emoji. You can also now put accents in page titles if you want, but beware this probably makes them harder to search for.
 
  • Star Army experienced a brief outage between about 11am-12 noon EST today.
  • I ended up completely blocking the country of Singapore due to these Chinese bots.
  • If you're from Singapore and RP on SARP, email me at [email protected] and we'll figure out a way to proceed.
 
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