The Intergalactic Highway

Thanks so much Warwulf! You have done such an amazing job and we are so grateful!

As for your suggestions, I approve of your 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th suggestion. They all sound great and I think it'd be a good opportunity to host an art challenge/graphic design competition here on the forums for people to submit their design for each forum sub-section. Thoughts, everyone?

Once again, thank you for all your hard work upgrading the forums and getting them back online. Couldn't have managed without you!

Not sure where to make a note of this...

But ooops!

I was trying to ban the 117.0.0.0/8 subnet. Apparently, I'm not good at numbers, because I banned all subnets from 117.0.0.0 through 177.255.255.255. Typo. In the process, I banned nearly a billion IP addresses. Fortunately, I realize my mistake... after Phoenix let me know that her Droid was among the masses banned.

Details.

Wulfy, maybe you could explain this then, coz its been bothering me for the last few minutes

This is what i have been seeing when i logged in today:

Registered users: Baidu [Spider], Google [Bot], Venatrix

Any website has "bots" or" crawlers" visiting them at all times. This is how google, for instance, works as a search engine when you type in different phrases to seach for. Wulfey merely registered these IP addresses under their specific names. They lurk constantly to search for updates.

There are many more, of course, making up the bulk of the site's visits.

I was wondering about those bots too.

So basically, what your saying is this.....there are legitimate bots that have a useful function that lurk around on a website and there are other bots who lurk around whose only function is to spam. So Warwulf made sure that the site can distinguish between spamming bots and bots like google who actually have a useful function. Do I have that right??

You would be correct in that assumption, BRF. Spambots will try to register in order to post, so by altering the registration process of the site and adding certain traps that a spambot will go for (but a 'good' bot will not due to the trap having a 'warning' written into the code that regular search bots respect and follow whereas a spambot will ignore this warning).

*blinks*

This is soooo confusing....
Tried learning to do this web building stuff once.... then decided that i am to damn blond for that kinda thing.

So with other words, there are bots for nearly everything these days, accept one that cleans my house, and my car huh?

*blinks again*

So with other words, there are bots for nearly everything these days, accept one that cleans my house, and my car huh?

Those exist also.. The Roomba and the Scooba vacuum and mop floors.

A web crawler (also called a bot or spider);

A web crawler is a relatively simple automated program, or script, that methodically scans or "crawls" through Internet pages to create an index of the data it's looking for;

A spambot is an automated computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. Spambots usually create fake accounts and send spam using them, although it would be obvious that a spambot is sending it.

Was anything ever moved? o.o

Yes. The board was unusable for like two days. That was like two or three months ago.