UC status

[montenzi]

Hi!

Long story short, please try not to upload any images to the site for the next day or two. We’ve completely run out of disk space. I had to delete the web statistics directory — nobody really looks at it and it’s basically not usable anyway (awstats). It was just taking up space. But without removing it, I couldn’t even restart the site.

WIP (not RIP)

@rousselle will share more details later.

[montenzi]

UPDATE: You can upload images now — I’ve cleaned up about 2 GB of space. @rousselle will post a more detailed update anyway.

[Honeybee]

Thanks muchly Monte. Maybe we could try keeping our pics under 500kb

NB We now exist on 2 different IPS so we will have to see how Rousselle (and Montenzi) want us to proceed

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[montenzi]

Thanks muchly Monte. Maybe we could try keeping our pics under 500kb

NB We now exist on 2 different IPS so we will have to see how Rousselle (and Montenzi) want us to proceed

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True. The database will be re-imported there after testing, and your posts will be lost, so please use this one for now.

[bdawg923]

Can you just disable image uploading altogether? And I'd possible, add a message somewhere in the compose box, or a banner at the top to use one of the many free image hosts on the internet

[drboone]

Oh $deity, don't do free image hosts. We'd like the images to be around in a few months, not suffer from rate limits, ...

[montenzi]

Can you just disable image uploading altogether? And I'd possible, add a message somewhere in the compose box, or a banner at the top to use one of the many free image hosts on the internet

All good — feel free to use UC as usual. There’s no size limitation atm; it was just a temporary measure to fix the site and do some work on it.

[bdawg923]

Oh $deity, don't do free image hosts. We'd like the images to be around in a few months, not suffer from rate limits, ...

I'd like uc to be around more than some old images though

[kevork]

Images are so important for posterity and one of the aspects that make forums unique. If the Kickstarter plugin worked properly for campaigns that are still TBD, I wouldn't need to upload images for each project. The images are tiny jpegs, but they probably add up. I have very little coding experience but I wonder if the raw BBCode can be looked at, cited here: viewtopic.php?t=4106

We have some brilliant minds in the community. I imagine certain things can be improved in terms of forum functionality when we fully migrate. For example, Jocu's pip/tuck forum had a BBCode plugin where image attachments can be rotated after being uploaded to the site. This would help remedy the bug where images are rotated by 90°.

[montenzi]

If you’re reading this message, you’re on the new unitedcardists.org domain. There might still be some unknown issues, so please report them here.

It’s a new hosting provider, completely separate from the old one. Hopefully it will work much better than before.

[bdawg923]

New issue: it's way too fast. Slow it down a little so it more resembles old UC

[MagikFingerz]

Pros of being an old-timer: Still had my logins from the original .org site saved in my password manager, so I didn't have to retype anything

[Honeybee]

Pros of being an old-timer: Still had my logins from the original .org site saved in my password manager, so I didn't have to retype anything

Can I see a little greying of the temples on Neo there

[GandalfPC]

No AI needed for that…

IMG_7369.jpeg (30.43 KiB) Viewed 4912 times

[hsbc]

Oh $deity, don't do free image hosts. We'd like the images to be around in a few months, not suffer from rate limits, ...

I've been using imgur to upload pictures to post here ever since I joined and have never had an issue

[Honeybee]

I am not familiar with imgur so I looked it up. I see it blocked the UK rather than comply with some regulations around the Online Safety Act.

[kevork]

It's reddit's sister site for image uploading. It's good as long as the site remains alive. Some old forum images used tinypic for example and those images are long lost.

Embedding imgur images here does look better as the preview image is much larger compared to the attachments on the site, although clicking each attachment does open the file in full size.

[Timmargh]

I am not familiar with imgur so I looked it up. I see it blocked the UK rather than comply with some regulations around the Online Safety Act.

I bless my NordVPN subscription every time I visit.

[GandalfPC]

All of my devices run “Scissors OS” - I can’t recommend that anyone else run with Scissors though…

[Honeybee]

montenzi and rouselle, the functioning of UC has been fantastic for the last couple of months - Thanks again from everybody

[GandalfPC]

82,121 “users” online at the moment - we are getting crushed and are in need of some ddos protection I should think…

[Honeybee]

It is amazing that it is still functioning well - the attacks of last year saw 20,000 users wipe us out.

[GandalfPC]

dropped to 40k now and is a lot snappier

[rousselle]

I've been doing a little bit of research, and it would appear that some of these waves of visits are not necessarily intentional DDoS attacks, but rather AI bots trolling our site for training content. You can put up the usual text file to say, "Hey, robots, smurf off," but they ignore those. And if we did that anyway, we'd end up disappearing from legit search engines (for however long those continue to last.)

I'm tempted to build a lava trap. I don't know if AI bots are the issue or not, but that would be one potential way to get them away from the forum itself.

Grrr.

[Honeybee]

Hey Alan, you don't happen to know if anyone is working on resurrecting P52?