Attack of the bots
That problem with the bot attacks got significantly worse today, and I’ve been working on trying to protect against it. I already had a plug-in that’s supposed to protect against them, but it’s obviously no longer very effective. So I did a bunch of research, decided on a different plugin, managed to get into the files of the blog – not an easy task when under attack – and installed the new one.
It’s improved the situation for now, so I’m hopeful. We’ll see if the improvement continues.
Apologies for any delays you may have experienced. Bots get smarter and smarter as time goes on, but perhaps plugin developers can stay ahead of them.
What are the bots trying to do, if you don’t mind my asking?
mkent:
To get information. My site has very little information of the type they want, but they don’t know that.
I help monitor a mailing list, and have the impression that AI is getting involved in the spambot business. The typical attempt is something that reads somewhat on topic, but a bit vague on the details. It reads like a politician speaks. Then there will be a link to some company or other at the bottom. Because I don’t want to discourage folks who are just ignorant, it is getting harder to just reject the posts without thinking much about it. I worry about the future 🙂
Can’t remember when I first came here, but wasn’t too long ago—maybe 6+ months (?). Anyway, as a newbie still – seems like a lot of new commenters are showing up…maybe they’re older users just checking in (?). Russia is desperately looking to turn American public opinion against Ukraine, so maybe some of it is Russian Troll Factories.
Seemed to have gotten better for a little while, and then I’ve had some minor slow downs yesterday or day before. Brief issues today and were quickly over…
Chuck:
These are not the sort of bots that place spam in the comments. These try to burrow into the inner workings of the site and steal things or deposit malware.
Going to treat this like an Open Thread.
Reading the Chicago Tribune this morning (I just get the Sunday edition for arts and entertainment goings on around the city) I came across something I found astounding.
The title of this opinion piece: “Is it time for the U.C. to abandon cherished neutrality and join the fight?”
Many here are likely aware that in 2015 the University of Chicago issued a statement asserting its commitment to good old fashioned free speech and debate on its campuses.
The author spends the first few paragraphs describing that declaration as quixotic at best. But things have changed now. Of course, you know what those things are, but here I’ll just quote the author:
I don’t really have a point here. I suppose it’s just that if one takes this person seriously, and perhaps one shouldn’t, perhaps he’s being disingenuous, then liberals and conservatives evidently live in two entirely separate worlds of reality.
I don’t know if bots are the cause, but for the last 24 hours I have gotten this message when I try to open up Newneo: “Too Many Requests The user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time.” (Error 429)
Online searchers have suggested: wait 5-10 minutes, clear your browser history, clear DNS cache. I have tried them. Waiting seems the most successful. The rest of the suggestions appear to be what a website could do, not what a user could do.
https://geekflare.com/dev/ways-to-fix-error-429-too-many-requests/
I’m glad you are back up. I was afraid you had been hacked.
What Gringo said.
But for not as long.
Gringo’s “Error 429 Too Many Requests” is informative…geez!? Pain if one has to do so much. neo does have a humongous data base after all these years. My blog shares a server, but my data base is very small. Even my old 2004 WP blog has a small data base – WordPress runs that one so I don’t know how they do servers on freebies. I’ll do another 4-6 years blogging – mainly to save tech info that I use, and then see where X is at by then…
I wonder if Substack has good anti-bot protections built in?