Site Tweaks, Bug Fixes and other Stuff

[Big Kev]

It occassionally bobs up on this machine.
Windows 7 and IE9

[Tripps]

It seems to me to appear when logging into threads which have recently had pictures added. Clue?

[Big Kev]

Is the clock right on the server?

[Big Kev]

Is the clock right on the server?

It appears to be an hour behind.

[PanBiker]

The time of your posts is correct Kev as far as I can see. This post should be around 12.40 which is correct.

[Big Kev]

Re: Site Tweaks, Bug Fixes and other Stuff

Author: PanBiker » Wed Jul 18, 2012 11:39 am

The time of your posts is correct Kev as far as I can see. This post should be around 12.40 which is correct.

I'll have a rummage at this end. Clock is correct on the laptop but the posts are showing an hour behind.

[Big Kev]

BST button wasn't checked in Board Preferences. I was showing GMT. Sorted now.

[PanBiker]

Aha, the old personal preference trap. Got to admit I didn't think of that one Kev even though I fell foul of it myself when the site first went up, Doh!

[Big Kev]

Aha, the old personal preference trap. Got to admit I didn't think of that one Kev even though I fell foul of it myself when the site first went up, Doh!

You can't beat a bit of "user error"...

[Stanley]

Google error popped up on login this morning and locked me out by starting what looked like a big download. Clocked out and back in and it seems to have gone away....

[Bodger]

By heck, theer war sum reet queer post o'nt seet yusterdy

[Doc]

Yes Bodger, we are currently under attack by an army of automated registration bots who attempt to register and post their spam messages, fortunately we are deterring most of them but like yesterday some of them manage to get through our security procedures. A bit like the performance of our wonderful "Border Agency"

[Whyperion]

Are they automated ( I know a script wouldn't that difficult to write ) , or are they cheap labour in India etc logging on to put assorted things to sell / advertise ?

[PanBiker]

It appeared to be a combination of both. Three which had advertising website bylines all came from the same place in India although the registration names purported to be westernised. Almost certainly a paid for advertising ploy. The Russian and Polish elements looked to be random machine generated usernames, where there was text associated with the attack it looked to be in Polish and was cloned and copied into various threads. The stuff that came for the USA was in some form of broken English but part gibberish and was regarding issues in the gay community. All of the accounts have been blocked and banned and all associated drivel deleted. I think between Doc and myself we zapped about 30 accounts and deleted a similar number of posts. Spammers and Trolls

are not welcome

[Doc]

Most of them are automated and we manage to catch most of these using a script which uses a randomly selected Question and Answer dialogue which needs human intervention to enable them to proceed to the next level in the registration process. e.g. What town in the north England is this website mostly concerned with?
This process catches around 99% of the automated bots, but their are some very sophisticated bots out there which do manage to get through.

The main problem we have is the human spammer, who after successfully answering the Q&A's will become a normal registered member which will allow them to spam away to their hearts content.

Once they appear on the site, they are quite distinctive to the site admins and moderators who have got use to recognising their patterns, we just delete those members and their postings, it is a constant battle keeping them at bay, but we will endure, to keep the site nice, clean and tidy just the way you like it.

[Gloria]

Thanks Doc.

[PanBiker]

Just zapped another one - Bangladesh - known dictionary attacker and spammer - now history.

[Stanley]

There are some weird people out there. What is the twisted logic behind doing this? Nice to see that Gloria has recognised and thanked to Mafia for their constant vigilance. Funny thing is that I am not seeing them like I used to. Perhaps you should get up at 4am Bodge!

[Bodger]

I do Stanley, to go home

[Whyperion]

I don't mind a few ( I think some tried posting pension plans on the Banks or whatever thread - invite them to become advertisers at a horrendous price ), some of their posts nearly made sense.

[Gadge]

G'day folks,

I've noticed that image links [to images in the OGFB Gallery] in my older posts are now broken.

A fairly easy manual fix is to edit the image links, to change them to the BBCode version.

For example, ["img]http://oneguyfrombarlick.co.uk/gallery/ ... ge_id=8596[/img"]

is replaced by ["image]8596[/image"] - without the quotes; those are just there so that the link text is displayed, not the actual image.

[Stanley]

Who has the time to manually edit thousands of links? Not me.......

[Gadge]

Sure thing, Stanley.
I was speculating that as it's a pretty simple procedure, an automated script to do it might be possible - but I'm not enough of a programming geek to do that, if indeed it can be done.

[PanBiker]

Hi Doug, thanks for the input. What looks like a fairly simple solution is actually far from that. First of all the Gallery is a separate module to the main site software and has its own file handling procedures. It is actually the most complex add on ever produced for the phpBB platform. The URL structure for each image has altered with the latest release of the software to simplify the file handling and allow for future potential development of the module.

Now down to the nitty gritty. The URL string that you see copied into posts from Gallery module is not actually stored as a full text string there for any given image. It is generated from multiple variables within the module itself and now has a different format to previous versions hence the loss of existing historical Gallery images in the posts. All images held in have been converted to the new format.

The site runs on an Apache based server within an SQL database. Each post on the site and the contents of that post, (including text based URL strings for images) is not held in a single field but spread across multiple fields within various database tables. This is the nature of a relational database and is what gives the database model its resilience and speed. Individual records, (posts shall we say) are not held sequentially so the order you see them in on the site is not the same as exists in the database tables, the same applies to sequential image records in the gallery.

As well as targeting the image string from within a post any routine would also have to deal with all the relational indexing fields associated with the record. If you take it out to modify it, you have to put it back with all that information intact as well.

If the simplified BB code string was used it would result in a much smaller image. What would fix it would be to harvest the original fully qualified URL strings for the image and convert each one into the new format. Same rules apply though, we would have nearly 88,000 post to troll through looking for 14,000 images.

I have not found a solution so far but am keeping my eye on the phpBB support forum and the current gallery developers forum to see if anyone else is in the same boat.

[Whyperion]

i dont know how easy it is in flat file format but I have imported database fields into something like opencalc, found the relevant colum with the string reference that needed changing , changed the (wrong bits) then exported back out the database.

highly risky and I was using the biggest excel I could find and a hacked version of MSAccess, but I suppose the underlying method is the same. I have also done it in MS command line with a <replace> function, works ok until one can hit file names or fields containing non alphanumeric characters, or can change part strings one didnt want changing.