The joys of webmastering

by Diane Duane

So after various struggles and craziness the YoungWizards.com site finally has its WordPress install running for all to see, and the old Drupal install is packed away, and I can look forward to a week or three of fixing busted links and installing URL redirects and handling other delights. It’s all a bit shambolic at the moment, but at least (in the sense of being blissfully unhacked) it’s clean.

Some other issues, though, are raising their heads as I watch the new install bed in. The security software’s “live traffic” function is showing me the most charming things! Especially spammers’ scripts battering futilely at the spot where the Errantry Concordance wiki used to be. I’m taking notes and blocking IPs and having so much fun. (I don’t want to block all of Russia, there are fans of the YW books in Russia, but, you know, if I have to…)

Less fun, though, and more of an annoyance, are the bandwidth thieves. One New York Jets website in particular keeps calling and calling and CALLING on the server that holds the YW discussion forums, trying to pull up a particular smiley.

Now, this smiley isn’t even on my server any more. God knows how many years ago it was there. But this damn website is hitting the Forums about once every five seconds, and this annoys me. Yes, teeny tiny bits of bandwidth are involved in the short term, but how long has this been going on? It’s just not right.

So I’m going to break the site in question of this habit by the most straightforward means I can think of. I am loading the graphic you see below into the directory and giving it the filename in question. We’ll see how long it takes for the website’s sysadmins to kill that particular link… but I’m betting it won’t take more than a day or so, as the image is 800×800 px and the sentiment is, well, not that polite.

worlds_smallest_dick_nonexistent_file_full

(Yes, I know some people use explicit porn images for this kind of thing. Not my style, though it’s fun to think about.)

…And now let’s see how good their sysadmins are. 🙂

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6 comments

Abigail Tyrrell September 12, 2016 - 5:27 pm

lmao – well deserved revenge.

dianeduane September 12, 2016 - 7:42 pm

Heh. 🙂 Well, we’ll see if they get the message.

Nate Hoffelder September 12, 2016 - 7:00 pm

LOL

dianeduane September 12, 2016 - 7:42 pm

(chuckle) BTW thanks very much for the offer of help; it was much appreciated. I think things have gone pretty much OK so far. Got some massaging to do on robots.txt and many 301s to lay in, but such is life.

Alexander Richards September 13, 2016 - 8:02 pm

You should let Dairine loose on them 8)

T'Saavik September 15, 2016 - 7:37 pm

checkout fail2ban, I believe there is a wordpress plugin for it.

Comments are closed.

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