David Andrews Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 Can this site be reformed as an American 501(c)3, for tax deductible funding contributions? Can the JFKA Debate be separated from Education Forum and recreated as a 501(c)3? I admit, I am ignorant about whether this tax designation currently applies to internet sites. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Ness Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 7 hours ago, Steve Thomas said: Bob, Is this what a Denial of Service attack is all about? Steve Thomas 7 hours ago, Michael Clark said: Steve, A denial of service attack essentially floods a site with requests, such that legitimate requests don’t receive a response. Imagine setting up a machine to flood a business with phone calls. Legit customers would get busy signals. This is more like having a commercial landlord who bases your rent on how many people walk through the door of your shop.. Some fool or group of them decides to walk in and out to drive up your rent. Yep. What Michael says. I can't imagine the hosts not fixing this issue. This is clearly a malicious effort on somebody's part and should be relatively easy figure out from log files. The log files should have referring ip addresses they can trace to the sources. Two minutes? If the source(s) is behind a proxy then we know it's an attack and they should be able to contact the admins of the referring ip's, block the offending ip addresses or both. It's an attempt to discourage the the discussions we've had going on that are critical of certain parties I would guess. Invision should have a policy when or if this sort of thing happens. As far as the EF and specifically the JFK Debate forum goes I really hope there is a backup available to reconstitute the fantastic information here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Santos Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 There are 91 guest right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Ness Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 2 minutes ago, Cory Santos said: There are 91 guest right now. It seems there's a new one every minute or so. Probably one of our gems here found a cute script somewhere and is running it for fun. If the admins here have permissions to view ips that would be nice to know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Ness Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 Off topic but this is another thing that the admins should look into. https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/453511-protect-your-forum-dmca/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 (edited) A couple of years ago I saw, and notified James about, mass visits of guests, in bursts. I sent him screen shots showing 3 to 4 thousand guests at a time. I am pretty sure that I posted a thread about it. Edited December 7, 2019 by Michael Clark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Ness Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 5 minutes ago, Michael Clark said: A couple of years ago I saw, and notified James about, mass visits of guests, in bursts. I sent him screen shots showing 3 to 4 thousand guests at a time. I am pretty sure that I posted a thread about it. https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8001-dp42-guest-view-limits/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 https://invisioncommunity.com/buy What are 'online visitors'? Online visitors are those that are currently actively browsing your community and those active in the last 15 minutes (when their session expires). Our Community in the Cloud packages don't limit the total membership of your community; only the online user count. We calculate on a 48-hour average online count so short-term bursts of traffic should not impact your package level. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 (edited) This was in March of 2017 Edited December 7, 2019 by Michael Clark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James R Gordon Posted December 7, 2019 Author Share Posted December 7, 2019 Michael, That is really interesting. How do you get the system to print the total number of guests. At this moment the system appears to suggeststhere are 180 Guests on line. Invision are promising to get back to me on Monday. I will raise their statemet about Online Visitors. That statement suggests online visitors are our problem. Well that is going to change on Monday, Your listing of 3,662 guests ought to increase our monthly payment. What I am now waiting to see is whether there is a charge beyond their present stated limit. Your identified 3,662 limit is way beyond that. Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 7, 2019 Share Posted December 7, 2019 James, that screenshot was one I sent you a few years ago, via email. That list of number of users currently online is at the bottom of subforum pages. I searched about half of the sub forums, looking for posts that had an unusual number of views for the topic and the ago of the post. There must be some tools available to admins to see “most active” or “most recently” viewed threads. Back in 2017, I had noticed a pattern.... when those massive guest user counts came about, it was near the end of the month, and every user was on a unique post, no duplicates. It was as if some bot came in and scanned or viewed every thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James R Gordon Posted December 7, 2019 Author Share Posted December 7, 2019 Thanks Michael, I had not understood in 2017 what you were saying. I will ask about what tools we have to see “most active” or “most recently” viewed threads. When Invision get back to me I now have a number of questions for them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 8, 2019 Share Posted December 8, 2019 If there is no single post or thread that comes up with some ridiculously high number of recent views, then it is likely the same thing we were seeing back in 2017; where periodically, something or someone comes in and views or scans every thread. The difference may be that whoever it is is taking longer (longer than 20 min.) or invision tightened-up thresholds (to 20 min) for billing, or they just decided to start paying attention. In any event, they should be able to detect, prevent, monitor or track an event such as that captured in my screenshot.They certainly should not be trying to hold us accountable for such an event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Clark Posted December 8, 2019 Share Posted December 8, 2019 It could be the wayback machine, or something similar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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