this website has gone ballistic.

For ducts, I use a special 3M thermal tape. Looks like glorified foil. For ducks, duck tape, of course. For backcountry use, there is a special military tape, for some reason, the name escapes me at the moment.

Maybe I should get Danny a roll for the Web site.

 

I have some bailing twine that I could contribute .

 

Bailing twine, duct tape, whatever will fix it would be nice. Seeing post hang up again. I thought maybe if I stayed away the problem might go away. No such luck...

Actually I think someone needs to put up some barb wire fencing to keep the chinese hackers out.

 

WEB site is triple/double posting and hanging at times. But not all the time.

 

What gain if any and what pleasure do these Chinese hacker / spammers get out of messing with the PC website? I don't get it?

To the computer savvy: Are the hackers purposefully attracting this site daily or is it some program that randomly selects sites that are vulnerable? I'm clueless.. Is it hard to block or stop it from happening? Thx.

 

Still better than any other site.

 

You talking about the green tape with cloth in it?

 

It's either fully or partially automated, and it's incredibly hard to block. Full automation... you'd be surprised how ineffective captchas have gotten. And, even when a bot can't successfully read the captcha, they have captcha farms that consist of a room full of people that simply fill in captchas, so the bots can use them to create accounts on forums. The other thing I've seen is sites that are "fill in captchas and win a (popular consumer electronics device)" - you never win the device, but you've helped them create a bunch of spam accounts.

And what they hope to get out of it is the hope that out of thousands of messages, they get one sucker to actually click the link to their site, or Google picks up the link from here to their site and increases their pagerank being from a popular site.

In any case, the most effective ways to block it... a captcha does help some even given the ways of getting around them. There's blacklisting users based on their presence on the Stop Forum Spam blacklist, which can be automated. There's preventing users from posting links before they've participated in the community enough to obviously not be a spammer, although that doesn't prevent the spam, it just prevents it from being useful. There's manually approving all registrations. There's even blacklisting entire regions of the world - blocking China altogether is one strategy I've seen, although that's obviously something that depends on whether the subject of the forum is relevant to China, and I've seen claims that the Chinese government sponsors attacks on American sites (both spam and more direct attacks) in the hopes that the sites block Chinese users, expanding the Great Firewall without actually expanding the Great Firewall.

 

The easiest way to stop it is to go into your settings (click on your user name) then go to 'Privacy'. In the 'Receive Your News Feeds' make sure the box is checked and select Members Only.

 

What I want to know is how they manage to post so many messages when we have such trouble with one

 

As far as the posting delay, I'm pretty reliably able to snap it out of interminable delay: click cancel on the refresh, then it does refresh, ok.



(Had to do that just now, lol.)

 

Sure do wish that would work for us old timers on Win 7... Still double posting tonight. Just happened in my last post.

 

Mendel, I've been trying that trick for the last 2 days but the hangups and duplicates have been atrocious even so. What has been happening when I try refreshing the page is that I lose half my post or so. A real pain in the you know what!!

 

Maybe the mods like your opinion so much, they want to see it twice

 

@Blizzard_Persona I put a like on your first post, it wouldn't take, got the working working symbol in upper right corner, stopped the refresh, then it took. The hang up must have something to do with the page getting stuck in a refresh. And yeah, agree: there is a risk of losing part of your posting.

 

There's an uplifting article at cleanmpg, about some folks out for a drive:

So the police get a call of a slow moving car on the interstate | CleanMPG

Seems like PriusChat conditions this morning, lol.