Corpses of the III Reich, It's finally here! Corpses of the III Reich. Options

[rocky]

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[Sureshot]

forum spam?

[Cataclysm=J]

Yeah, seems to be a lot of it recently.

[Spook Tooth]

Yeah, I haven't followed the linkage but decided we'd leave it up since it's not obsene or illegal or whatnot as far as I know. Because it's so unlikely to generate any positive feedback I also thought it would serve as an embarrassing example of how pointless the posting of forum spam is here.

Others who have posted blatant spam that is not of a gaming nature have been deleted and blocked from ever returning again (as far as it is possible to do so).

We believe the additional spamming is due to the increased prevalence of forum spamming in general (since it's really something you can google easily to see a particular spammer and his witless message cropping up in all sorts of places and zillions of unrelated forums). Also, our successful Abandonware campaign means we have a slightly higher profile on the internet now so it's possible some of the crappier elements such as spamming have seen our higher traffic and added us to their must 'do' list.

Anyway, ta for the vigilance. We aim to keep on top of spamming and nip it in the bud so as to remove it as soon as we're aware of it, so we appreciate our real members share the same sensible attitude to us about it all - it looks like we'll be getting a whole lot more and no doubt there'll be some special Invisionboard antispam plugins being developed at some point, so until then...

[Cataclysm=J]

Unfortunatly few people have static IP address that you can easily block (or report) and then you get compuerts which are hidden by a router so not much you can do really.

On the topic of bandwith and the increasing popularity of ExG I have found it particularly slow recently, I don't know if were reaching the limits of the hosting or what but its only with ExG that I have the problem and it can be really slow sometimes.

[Spook Tooth]

Yes, we have had trouble with our hosts in the past and it looks like the same trouble is back again, albeit maybe not so frequently. Even with additional members onsite at once, our server load is still pretty trifling and it is certainly not the fact we're over our bandwidth or other hardware/database usage conditions. Anyway...

If you download Fasterfox (assuming people are using Firefox), then you can time how long it takes a web page request to actually load up. It ought not to be more than a very few seconds at most but it does hang forever sometimes. If you can keep a record of these slow loading times then we can forward the info onto our hosts who'll then know at which times our server was unresponsive. They say it'll help them identify why and what was causing the overload.

Though we have a business package with One and One, we do share the resources with other sites and sometimes the resource load balancing gets bad and we suffer - they said last time it was due to the server's MySQL database being overloaded (not ours but some other site sharing the same resources). We've been with One and One since the start (3 odd years) and only in the last 6 months or so, have we had real cause for complaint or experienced any poor site performance. But it appears the site interruptions are getting more frequent and they are failing us somewhat.

We will email One and One and so, if people can remember to log the site loading times on the occasion it's unusually slow (5secs+) and note the time (you can copy and paste the exact time as it's displayed bottom right of the page), then that'll help them to see there is a problem and what's causing it.

We have banning masks, Cat. You're right that banning IP addresses isn't exactly effective if the user isn't on a static IP address or logging in from a different computer (internet cafe or whatnot). But there's little we can do about that fact. We also ban certain past member names from rejoining as well as their email address and often the email domain name, since it's typical that that is a remailing type email account type which is typically dodgy. So, though nothing's perfect in banning them, it does help since all three banning masks appear to be quite effective at keeping persistant spammers away - the 1drabwhatsit guy rejoined once he'd been deleted but not once we'd banned those three sign-up aspects. I'm unsure whether these spammers manually join up or whether they just use bots or whatnot but if anyone has any ideas on how to stop these irksome turds from signing up to spam us then please feel free to share them with us.

[Cataclysm=J]

Its people doing it now, to expand free advertising on the net. They need people to get round the security picture but it could well be bots doing the rest.

To be honest if it were anyother site I wasn't a part of and it took as long as this does sometimes I would just give up and try somewhere else so I think it is quite important that it gets sorted soon and as you've been with them for a while they should be working hard to find the problem.

[Sureshot]

Was going to post a new topic on this today as I wasn't sure if I was the only one suffering from slow load times. I found the following once I loaded up fasterfox

To load ExG 45.6 secs
View New posts 44.5 secs
Corpses of III Reich 41.8 secs
Add reply 9.00 secs
Add post 84.6 secs!!!!!!
Edit 29.3 secs

Compared to other random sites in my bookmarks this is quite noticably slower;

Guardian 2.11 secs
BBC 0.45 secs
CNN 6.11 secs
Toms 5.1 secs
Amazon.uk 3.55 secs

[Cataclysm=J]

Yeah, thing page just took over 50 seconds, if they don't fix it maybe its worth moving hosting becuase this is pretty terrible for what is ment to be a bussiness package. If we were a business we wouldn't make any money.

Went to Uni Of Teesside and got: 0.688
Then GB-UK: 1.844

[Spook Tooth]

You are both absolutely right. Thanks for posting these details since they will help us in getting help resolving this issue with One and One.

I am really very sorry you guys have been suffering with such poor loading times. I truly am, as I know only too well how frustrating and tedious it is waiting for stuff to load, especially when it can take up to a minute or more sometimes and all you want to do is do a 'fast' reply!

We will be conctacting One and One tomorrow. I might try and give them a telephone call but it's more likely to be an email first. It would be helpful to me if you could give me an indication of rougly how long you've both been putting up with these abysmmal load up times as I'd like to use the fact as ammunition in our case towards pointing out we're paying for better service than we've been getting on a business package.

Ta guys

[Cataclysm=J]

I don't know for sure but I would say over a couple of months, I'm just more annoyed as in front of my computer more now. Make sure you tell them that we've all complained to you and the hint of giving up has been mentioned as its been an on going thing, maybe they'll try to be quick about it then.

The smart thing for them to do would be to dedicate a whole box to you until the problem is solved as that would as least make it actually load for us.

EDIT: You could post up the address and we could all complain, barrage them with angry emails until they crack. Also my Dad said its pretty bad and he only still comes one becuase hes used the Arcade for ages.

[Spook Tooth]

Well, I have emailed them with a direct link here and also copied some site loading details I logged over the summer. The problem is severe enough to warrant their speedy attention so let's hope they get on to it as soon as possible (but this time fix it for the future).

Again, I can only apolgise that other members have had trouble with site loading too, else we would certainly have gotten on to this issue a lot sooner. Thanks for the support Cat - though it sounds tempting to get everyone emailing our hosts in complaint I don't think that would really help them to help us get it sorted but we'll keep it in mind for later.

[Cataclysm=J]

Well in several weeks when they still haven't fixed it and you explode and move hosts we can spam them to death then

[Cataclysm=J]

Have you had a reply from these guys yet becuase its still just as bad?

[Spook Tooth]

45 seconds to load main site from homepage
30+ secs to load this thread and 8 secs to 'add reply'
15 secs to load reply

To answer your question, Cat. Yes, site loading is still erratic and often unacceptably unresponsive so the first reply to us in view of this fact is not particularly promising but typical of our past dealings with them since it takes a while to get through their lower level fob off support structure to someone who can really help. It's the latter part of the process we're trying to speed up.

Thank you for contacting us.

The hardware on the server which your site is hosted on has already been
upgraded. Unfortunately this is the nature of shared hosting. Since you
are sharing a server with other customers, there may be at times spikes
in usage which may cause slight performance issues.

I have checked the load usages of the server which your site is hosted
on as well as the server which your MySQL server is hosted on. These
servers don't appear to have a high usage, but they do have load spikes
at times.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.