Squidboards is Under Attack. We Need Your Help

[ThestralZ]

So many of you have noticed that Squidboards has been breaking a lot recently. Every time it has been resolved, but we now have official confirmation from Warchamp7 as to what is happening. Apparently, some malicious entity has been sending spam to the site which, while it has been blocked from being showed, has clogged server resources and caused Squidboards to go offline. According to Warchamp, the issue has been fixed, but that's also what he has said the last few times.
So what do we do. I personally intend on applying to become a Mod in order to do my part to help protect this forum. If you can I would encourage you to do the same, but obviously not everyone can do something like that. If you're looking for a different way to help, spread the word! If more people know about the problem we can hopefully build support and try to stop the problem as a larger community.
All I know is that we will not let this forum be killed by random people in their basements. This place has too much history and community to go down that easy. We will make it through this together.

 

[isaac4]

I thought about this being a possibility the first time the servers went offline.
I was hoping I was wrong though but it's still good that we have a better idea of what's going on now.
I hope you get accepted to be a Mod.

 

[Warchamp7]

Heya, I wanna be clear it was not some malicious entity targeting Squidboards or anything like that. It is very common for automated bots or scripts to basically crawl across the internet trying to brute force their way in. It's simply the nature of the internet.

The recent outages were caused by two separate issues but happened very close to each other.

The first was a misconfiguration in one of my scripts. Every single night, a backup of Squidboards is made to ensure that in the event of something horrible, the site can be recovered. An error in that script was not properly cleaning up after it was finished and the storage it was using filled up.

The second issue was a separate misconfiguration error. We have systems in place to prevent the attempts at spam mentioned earlier, but they weren't properly restricting the attempts. The first time the outage happened, I cleared out the queue. The second time it happened, I realized the underlying problem.

I've been the technical admin for Smashboards for over a decade (And Squidboards since it's inception!). In fact I took on that role at Smashboards back when they experienced a massive, targeted DDoS that brought the site down for over a month back in 2013.

I promise these communities are deeply important to me, which is why I took ownership of them to ensure they stick around :)

 

[Aiko.Octo]

Whew.... really appreciate the technical details, and glad for the reassurance that everything's in good hands. I guess it's easy to panic when something dearly important to you appears suddenly unstable and it feels like there's little to nothing you can do about it, so this really is a relief to hear.

That said I have wondered for a while if having more volunteer staff could drive more activity here. Not just from the standpoint of controlling spam, but maybe just cleaning things up a bit (I'm not sure the the threads currently stickied in News & Features are particularly relevant anymore) and maybe posting news articles more frequently to highlight things like upcoming patches and splatfests. There's also been pushes to organize forum events (like the squidboards tournament, anniversary events, etc) and it would be neat to have some kind of official support or involvement in that if it's deemed appropriate.

Granted new staff have to be chosen carefully, which takes time and vetting, and one could argue that we don't really have an active problem that requires more moderators right now, but it still feels like something we could stand to benefit from enough to take under consideration.

 

[sevenleaf]

something i've been wondering about is whether or not the lack of active staff is what's keeping this forum from growing. as it stands, we're a community with a small group of regulars and like, one active moderator, which has worked well enough for that small group of regulars (hi, i'm one of them) but might make it so that the wider splatoon community can't just hop in without feeling like they're intruding on a close-knit circle.

@Aiko.Octo's point about the news & features forum also made me look back in that forum and realize that like... back when the site was more active (presumably; i wasn't there) there used to be articles about all sorts of things - game updates, competitive news, that color psychology article i just happened to stumble upon a while ago, etc etc. maybe if we had more volunteer news writers, we could in turn become more of a news hub for the community?

that's a longer-term conversation though. for the time being, i'm just glad the site as it is isn't doomed to crumble before our eyes like it was easy to catastrophize about the other night lol

 

[electronvolt]

On the subject of growing the forum, I have noticed we tend to get a lot of guests online according to the feed page (92 at time of posting, with 8 logged-in members). That might just be people with accounts checking without logging in, but if isn't, maybe we could somehow encourage more people to make accounts and post here? (If you are viewing this thread without an account, by the power vested in me (none), I hereby formally invite you to sign up and say hi! )

Aiko.Octo does have a good point about the news section. I don't really understand the game well enough to analyse patch notes, but I'd happily volunteer to put articles up about each splatfest as they're announced.

 

[ThestralZ]

On the subject of growing the forum, I have noticed we tend to get a lot of guests online according to the feed page (92 at time of posting, with 8 logged-in members). That might just be people with accounts checking without logging in, but if isn't, maybe we could somehow encourage more people to make accounts and post here? (If you are viewing this thread without an account, by the power vested in me (none), I hereby formally invite you to sign up and say hi! )

Aiko.Octo does have a good point about the news section. I don't really understand the game well enough to analyse patch notes, but I'd happily volunteer to put articles up about each splatfest as they're announced.

We've come to the conclusion that those people are actually just internet bots scrounging around and not real people, but I think making use of the news feature more would be good.

 

[Deleted member]

something i've been wondering about is whether or not the lack of active staff is what's keeping this forum from growing. as it stands, we're a community with a small group of regulars and like, one active moderator, which has worked well enough for that small group of regulars (hi, i'm one of them) but might make it so that the wider splatoon community can't just hop in without feeling like they're intruding on a close-knit circle.

@Aiko.Octo's point about the news & features forum also made me look back in that forum and realize that like... back when the site was more active (presumably; i wasn't there) there used to be articles about all sorts of things - game updates, competitive news, that color psychology article i just happened to stumble upon a while ago, etc etc. maybe if we had more volunteer news writers, we could in turn become more of a news hub for the community?

that's a longer-term conversation though. for the time being, i'm just glad the site as it is isn't doomed to crumble before our eyes like it was easy to catastrophize about the other night lol

yeah like for a news thingy it could be... people could add stuff like "oh I just found a smushed Cheeto at work everyone" (I remember someone said that but I forgot who, oops)

 

[sevenleaf]

yeah like for a news thingy it could be... people could add stuff like "oh I just found a smushed Cheeto at work everyone" (I remember someone said that but I forgot who, oops)

it was i, the one who encountered the remains of a flamin' hot cheeto

that wouldn't be News & Features Forum worthy lol, but i definitely think there's a lot more than game/DLC releases we could be writing news articles about. i really think keeping tabs on the comp scene through news articles would be a good idea