Task force TalkChess access

[Graham Banks]

It has become increasingly difficult for me to access Talkchess.

[Sylwy]

It has become increasingly difficult for me to access Talkchess.

Well, that may be a solution .....

[Graham Banks]

Thanks for the hint, Sylwy.

[chrisw]

Access to talkchess from anywhere in France, north or south, either by mobile phone or PC remains terrible. It’s unusable.

Access from UK functions without any fault all.

Clearly, someone is targeting specific countries. There really doesn’t seem to be any good reason why France access should be targeted. France really is not known as a centre for hacking.

[smatovic]

It seems (from studying the server log) the crash last Saturday morning was caused by the server being overloaded by requests from crawler bots. In itself there was no indication that the bots would be malicious. (Although it was a bit strange that one of the bots wasn't requesting any content from the forum, but desperately tried to register, log on and contact the admin all the time.) But there was no file robots.txt in the talkchess.com domain to put any restrictions on such bots.

The simplest remedy is of course to disallow access for all bots. But that would also mean forum posts will no longer can be found by search machines. An alternative is to throttle down the access rate of bots we want to allow, so they cannot do any damage.

What would be the bots that we would want to allow crawling the forum?

How useful is a TC if not indexed by search engines? There is an option for robots.txt to limit the crawlers, maybe you can try:

Code: Select all

Crawl-delay: 1

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/778 ... robots-txt

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Srdja

[smatovic]

Just to summarize, we still have:

1. Regional blocking going partial on, 403 Error
2. Frequent logouts
3. Search only for registered users (I am okay with that if 4. fixed)
4. robots.txt prevents all crawlers from indexing the site
5. confirmation mail for registry? Some users reported in the help section that
they do not receive TC emails via gmail accounts.

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Srdja

[chrisw]

Just to summarize, we still have:

1. Regional blocking going partial on, 403 Error
2. Frequent logouts
3. Search only for registered users (I am okay with that if 4. fixed)
4. robots.txt prevents all crawlers from indexing the site
5. confirmation mail for registry? Some users reported in the help section that
they do not receive TC emails via gmail accounts.

--
Srdja

I often try posting into the technical threads but it’s impossible. They’re also difficult to even follow because of Error.

Will this post post? I have no idea. Maybe, but how can one get involved in a technical thread when one’s long composed reply just highly likely gets Error-binned.

[smatovic]

Just to summarize, we still have:

1. Regional blocking going partial on, 403 Error
2. Frequent logouts
3. Search only for registered users (I am okay with that if 4. fixed)
4. robots.txt prevents all crawlers from indexing the site
5. confirmation mail for registry? Some users reported in the help section that
they do not receive TC emails via gmail accounts.

--
Srdja

I often try posting into the technical threads but it’s impossible. They’re also difficult to even follow because of Error.

Will this post post? I have no idea. Maybe, but how can one get involved in a technical thread when one’s long composed reply just highly likely gets Error-binned.

Let me quote myself from another thread:

Several members tried to engage into fixing the technical issues, IMO this about the founding fathers/elected moderators and the hosting-sponsor/site-owner, not a technical plane, I suggested to solve this by setting up a registered society to run TC withing an legal framework, it seems no one was interested to spend time in this. I am a tech guy, I can only fix the tech, if I am allowed to do, I can not fix the legal TC issues, or alike.

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Srdja

As far as I can see TC and the shop of the hosting-sponsor/site-owner still run on the same server, with Cloudfare as CDN in front. All issues are well known, only the polls got fixed, HGM sideloaded TC on another server and solved all of them, but as far as I got it there are legal issues with this, who owns TC. I don't know who owns TC, but those who run TC are not fixing the technical issues which causes TC to become a closed circle.

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Srdja

[mclane]

The best would be to shut down the shit and begin somewhere else new from the scratch. But this time without ANY company interfering with Admins and "ownership".

This kind of hijacking a computerchess forum that belongs to the members is IMO not satisfying if some members are blocked for whatever strange reason.
The forum should be open to all accept those acting against the Charta.

[Sylwy]

Again ?