There has been an army of thousands of bots relentlessly hitting garden.org for the past week and I have been blocking thousands of hosts in an effort to stop the attack or at least to make the site usable for most people. Unfortunately, some legitimate users also had the site interrupted for them from time to time.
Today I made a change that should make it so legitimate users will not be blocked, and this change might also make it more difficult for the attackers. I don't want to write what the change was in this public forum, lest the enemy is actually reading it for information that will guide their strategy.
But this change might affect the functionality of the site. So if anyone sees any new problems on garden.org, please do report them to this thread. Thank you!
There's often no rhyme or reason why a particular site is picked, I think it's just random bots and kiddies that do it just because they can. I used to admin several gaming forums and it was a constant battle. I finally saved my sanity by blocking 5 countries entirely where the majority of hits were coming from, and if we got a member from any of those locations, I could easily unblock their IP range. That's not something you could do here since there are members from every corner of the world. But it's a never ending battle that requires a lot of time. It's really appreciated that you keep the site working for us to enjoy.
Name: Johannian The Black Hills, SD (Zone 4b) 2Thes. 3:3
Somehow I can see you being an admin of a gaming forum, Nancy. A lot of troll little kids (or nowadays, unfortunately, even older kids) are out there in the gaming community, and a no-nonsense type of person is needed to keep them in check.
“Honorable is the one who prudently avoids danger (provided he does not compromise himself).” -Sir Thomas More
Profile picture is a picture of our Kängal, Mamanska, when he was 7 months old.
Turkey, Romania, China, Russia and India. There are websites where you can get lists of the IP ranges per country to make it easy to block. There were some from other countries as well, including from the US, so I could block just a smaller range of IPs to stop those. We would get between 100-300 fake signups a day posting virus links, trash, porn, scams, every day... blocking IPs got it down to maybe 2 or 3 a month.
That is positively mind boggling.
A lot of troll little kids (or nowadays, unfortunately, even older kids) are out there in the gaming community, and a no-nonsense type of person is needed to keep them in check.
