site issues

Fixed Maximum Image File Size

It was brought to my attention that the image gallery would throw an error indicating that there was no file attachment if a user tried to upload a file larger than 2MB. While the max file size was set to 6MB in the web site config, the PHP configuration still had the default 2MB limit set. I neglected to adjust this when I rebuilt the site.

I've increased the limit to 30MB. Have fun with it.

New Spam Countermeasure

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I've implemented a new antispam technique. Initial trials have been promising, but there is the potential to block legitimate users.

Recently there's been a huge surge in spam attempts. For the past month or so, I've been seeing about ten times the normal volume. This has the potential to be problematic if left unchecked.

User Registration Back Online

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Let's hope the spammers don't evolve too quickly.

New User Registration Temporarily Offline

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I've disabled the creation of new user accounts due to an issue with the spam filter. I'll re-enable it once I've got the problem worked out.

New Terms and Conditions

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Actually, they're not new. They're identical to the terms that were displayed on the old site. Only your senile old webmaster didn't have the registration agreement properly enabled when the new site went live. So I've installed a new module that makes sure everyone has agreed to the terms, since there's a good chance that people who have registered in the past year haven't. Don't worry, you only have to do it once. Then it's back to business as usual.

Spam, En Masse

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We've had spambots registring users on this site pretty much from day one of the relaunch. On average, we're blocking close to a hundred spam registrations per day. To put that in perspective: the number of users rejected in the past four months exceeds the total number of registered users.

The good news is the spam filter seems to be pretty darned good at blocking fake users. But I still want to look into better ways of stopping such things. In all likelihood, it's only going to get worse. Might as well get a head start on it.

On Size Escalation

Today, another person ran into problems with the upload size limit on the site.  If you tried to upload a picture larger than 2MB, not only would the upload fail, but the site would give you a rather useless error about the file being missing.  Sheer idiocy.  So I increased that maximum image size to 4MB.

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