scott wrote:

I reverted the items page back for now.

After checking some of the performance problems I could definitely see some of it was related to the number of users, since it was querying that table on every page visit. I removed all the user id's that did not have any content associated with them. When the botters started creating accounts, they added about 140,000 bogus ones. I deleted about 150,000 accounts today which should definitely help.

I also have a script to monitor the swap usage and restart the web services so this will hopefully stop the hosting company from suspending my server. So if you see the bad gateway error, the services are probably just restarting and should be up within 30 seconds.

I added a security question to the user creation page which I hope will stop the bots. I will keep an eye on the user accounts the next few weeks. I banned some of their ip address and setup some new firewall rules to better protect the server.

I spent some time tweaking the web server and mysql settings. I'm experimenting with some different settings, but the server seems to be running better now.

Thanks a lot scott! Lets wish no more problems arise here. Why would someone use bots here in wlodb? Being that this site is so used and doesnt harm anyone, i cant understand it