Admins

[switch 2 punyan, nya~]

In other words,

the og helixc friend

were not exactly friends, sorry. The original crew was already gone when dcco started posting on MattMakesGames around 2009, and the HelixC crew was run by a furry holding everyone else hostage, which is what Cook is still doing now by upholding this website.

[switch 2 punyan, nya~]

Somebody pretending to have made Cat Planet on the raocow forums is still the biggest mystery in all of this, however.

[switch 2 punyan, nya~]

One more time for old time's sake, take it away boys:

[SquareWheel]

My memory isn't as good as it used to be, but I'm pretty sure some of those events didn't play out quite as described.


(Rashomon, good movie)

At least when CK7 deleted the JCF, it seemed to be from a misunderstanding of why they'd been given control.  It wasn't malicious, just kind of dumb and impulsive.

And to be honest, I think you've blown up any drama with BW in your mind.  She and I used to butt heads too, but all of that stopped mattering yonks ago.  It all happened 20 years in the past, and we were either teenagers then or close to.  I have better stuff to worry about now like home insurance or job security or who's going to win Eurovision.

I still come here because I miss the old internet, and I like hanging out with my Helix pals.  You're welcome, too, but I think you'd be happier if you moved on from what's been eating you.

[SquareWheel]

Also yes the bots have been crazy, and that might be triggering the 503s I've noticed over the last few days.  I might need to start finding ways to block them.  Hope I don't have to put us behind Cloudflare, because centralization isn't ideal and that just complicates things.

[dcco]

In other words,

the og helixc friend

were not exactly friends, sorry. The original crew was already gone when dcco started posting on MattMakesGames around 2009, and the HelixC crew was run by a furry holding everyone else hostage, which is what Cook is still doing now by upholding this website.

im using "friends" in a petersonian sense

(altho i did consider most of us to be friends to some degree, especially since yeah it was literally in my teenage yrs when i barely had social interactino outside of here)

[hubol]

Yes, I want you all to be my friends, too :-) i met you all during a pivotal time that informed a lot of who i am and what i make. i feel bad for being a dick back in da day, i think ducko received the worst of that, so sorry dude!

q—not sure what to say, i think cook put it best… im not sure there is a good reason to harbor this tremendous grudge…

[SquareWheel]

Also yes the bots have been crazy, and that might be triggering the 503s I've noticed over the last few days.

Oh yeah, I'd say that's it.


We jumped from 8K hits per day to 200K, basically overnight.

[SquareWheel]

Cloudflare DNS propagation is currently in process.  There may be some SSL errors to sort out along the way.

[SquareWheel]

Okay, we're officially on Cloudflare.  I looked into some other options for fighting bots, but detecting and blocking them is often more expensive than just serving the page.  Hopefully that resolves the sporadic 503s.

[Tinister]

What's wrong with cloudflare?

[Tinister]

I was debugging 503s recently and it was php had been forking out to some unix tool to convert IPs to hostnames but for whatever reason one evening the server wasn't clearing up those processes so they just sat forever hogging resources.

[SquareWheel]

What's wrong with cloudflare?

Nothing really, but I'm wary of overcomplicating things.  That said, can't argue with results.  CPU usage plummeted when I switched over.



I was still seeing 503s though.  Digging in deeper, there was indeed a problem with zombie processes eating up server resources.  It looks like SMF does a hostname lookup for every connection, for ban and logging purposes.  They time out, but slowly.  I disabled that feature and our numbers returned to normal.

It looks like SMTP mail is broken.  I thought it might be from the certificate changeover (mail.cutey.zone is now covered by the CF Origin cert instead, which won't work), but actually, I think SMF just crafts really spammy-looking messages.  I ran a separate PHPMailer test with mail-tester.com and we scored 10/10.  Sending a password reset request through SMF triggers a SpamAssassin scores around 20 every time though, which is bloody high.

Not really sure how to fix that.  I could try updating SMF, but the addons we use literally makes changes to the forum source files and it's the most cursed thing I've ever seen.  I'm sure an upgrade is doable, but it'd probably break all the themes and addons and make people sad.

On the plus side, while reviewing things I discovered that I named the sending email address Parakarry, which I find delightful.

[SquareWheel]

Think I've got the mail sorted now.  I made some changes to the message template, since it was reading as too generic.  I also tinkered with the mail send function.  Something was off with the email MIME headers, but after struggling with it for a while, I just grafted PHPMailer on to send correctly-coded messages.

The biggest problem though was a bayesian filter that very much did not like password reset emails.  I retrained it on all of my tests, and added a negative modifier for transactional email.

So that should be everything.