Why else would that id be on the ao pretty much all day, including like 2am? you’re the tech guy. can you think of another reason?
The new guy might just not know what the hell he is doing. they let Tom go who could have migrated the forum correctly. Wordpress is terrible. I don’t know why they would go from VBulletin to boring no character wordpress to begin with. this whole thing is very strange. them getting hacked the minute tom was let go is also strange. just points to the new guy being pretty clueless.
No, I agree that it’s quite likely a bot for the reasons you mention. And why would they have a bot on there unless it’s scraping? Still, no matter what they’re doing, using a scraper when you’ve got direct access to the database is just absurd.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I don’t get any of what’s going on. Everything that’s going on gets a wtf look from me. Including turning off access to the IP and then turning it back on again. Makes no sense.
They had Tom right down all his passwords before they let him go. And even if they didn’t, they’d be able to reset it on the server.
My suspicion is that there’s a combination of don’t know and don’t care. The site is admittedly way outside their wheelhouse, probably more trouble than its worth and nobody has mad skilz. Claude was expert, Tom knew his stuff. But with both gone they may be reduced to using someone’s brother who’s ‘good with computers’.
Or, there’s other stuff going on and they’re proceeding as planned. Could be, it’s not like I have any particular insight.
Story time. Long time ago I was a volunteer member of a local group that decided to go online. Everyone knew I worked on websites, And would build them one at n/c.
Except instead of me, they hired one of the member’s brothers who thought he’d like to get into web design. No experience. And, they paid him to do it.
Some months later he quit the project leaving it half completed. So no more web person. And by then, I wasn’t going to do it either. In the end, it was some years later before they actually got online.
This past Tuesday I’m on a zoom with another volunteer group I’m part of, and I get pinged with ‘we sure miss you at the other group’. Lol, it’s tempting, but I think I’m going to pass.
I see some folks over there talking about the history of the site. Here’s the true history, according to me:
The AO started as the result of space lobster. Serena was hosting on a free site that only had posts in chronological order and only kept something like 100 threads. User ‘space lobster’ posted 100 threads that were nothing, but because the site only kept 100 threads, it wiped the entire site. The second time it happened, G contacted Serena and offered to host (with backups). At the time G was running an actuarial bookstore in Canada and had rack space and an extra server. Bought a vbulletin license (I think there was another package that was tried temporarily) and off they went.
The Watercooler and the desert were all about the same time, but unrelated specifically to what created the original AO. The WC and the desert however contributed substantially to the traffic. That, and the fact that the AO stayed up when marks were released so everyone started going there for their marks. The SOA staff would put the marks up at 3pm on a friday then stop answering the phones, and the site would pretty much go offline for the weekend due to traffic load. The AO stayed up, though under heavy load some days. Students were passing around scripts that auto-refreshed the AO to watch for marks, then run them all day.
Not so different that GoA today. Serena reached out to G, G had an extra server (seems to be an ongoing thing) and spare rack space. G no longer has spare rack space, but yeah, now has another spare server. Just in case. Servers and SOA approved calculators, always have a backup.
The original server was in a closet in the basement of a Xerox building right across from Uwaterloo, along a railway line - that’s where they originally laid internet lines to universities back in the day. The Xerox building became a Blackberry building. G later had fibre installed in an office at way too much money (dug up the street and everything) and kept the AO at the office for a bit. IIRC, when the eastern seaboard was out of power for days that triggered moving to a colo facility at 1 yonge street in toronto (the toronto Star newspaper building). DW bought the site and G moved his stuff to 151 Front Street in Toronto, another colo facility, which is where GoA is now.
Now people on the AO are responding to the spam. It’s a bot, not a person led astray :).
And something funny going on here yesterday. 4 times the normal level of traffic, all from non-logged in users. The system identifies bots generally, but isn’t showing this as bot activity. I gotta believe it is though.
The new ao. If you look for recent posts, there’s some spam. And it’s been sitting there for more than 24 hours.
Speaking as a moderator, killing spam is a never-ending nuisance, but it’s about as easy as moderation gets. "Brand new poster, immediately posted link to a completely random commercial website. Kill the poster and all its posts. And real posters NEVER complain that you made a bad decision.
(Sites like this, where a human being approves new accounts, don’t get tons of spam. But sites where you can sign up automatically and post right away do. I’m a moderator on one such site and sometimes delete half a dozen spammers before breakfast.)
Which, by the way, makes it glaringly obvious how little traffic that site is getting. Sorta sad. They had a nice site, and could have trimmed it down without destroying it.
