Strange message about IP being blocked

[dlodoski]

Just use the board normally as yet another speed bump recedes in the rear view mirror.

If I had to make a semi informed assessment, it appears that one of our hosting providers internal firewall IP addresses has been blacklisted. This wouldn't be hard to accomplish with a modestly organized effort by some bad characters.

In any case, I'll ask around and see what kind of vulnerability the change I made would create. My guess is minimal, if anything. (Ironically, the firewall takes care of most of this sort of thing).

I'm still a bit chagrined that it got so much worse when I was essentially out of touch. It was good to get away though, fwiw.

[Fred588]

It just might be that the mechanism that submits an IP to spamhaus is, itself, faulty. For example, if the IP being submitted is improperly formatted, spamhaus would return an error message instead of whatever it normally does.

[dlodoski]

IP addresses (for hosts) are pretty straight forward - four values, none '0' or higher than 254. It's variable subnet masking that was a bitch back in the day, but I'm sure they have calculators/tools for that now.

This is just a case of an IP address that's part of the QSF hosting environment making it on a list. Stop checking the list and problem solved. How the address got there will most likely never be known.

That's pretty much it.

[sixgunzloaded]

Thank you again, Dave, for all you do for this site/community. Honestly, we're lucky to have as diligent an admin as yourself running this show. I can only imagine how much a pain it can be sometimes.

[dlodoski]

Thank you again, Dave, for all you do for this site/community. Honestly, we're lucky to have as diligent an admin as yourself running this show. I can only imagine how much a pain it can be sometimes.

It doesn't feel like a pain. You're welcome though. You, and everyone else.

As far as time goes, most of what I do is behind the scenes moderating. The movement of misplaced topics is the most visible thing. And sometimes 'Moderator' has to speak up. But mostly it's cleaning up after spammers and so on. As it happens, I just updated the Captcha questions, so hopefully that will be quiet for a while.

Moderating is house cleaning. It's not power. It's responsibility. I've been doing it for over 20 years now - going back to the Late Night forum at Deep Sinking. I really don't know why it's considered such a big deal elsewhere.

[MadMax359]

Thank you again, Dave, for all you do for this site/community. Honestly, we're lucky to have as diligent an admin as yourself running this show. I can only imagine how much a pain it can be sometimes.

well said, and it's good to be back to normal fetish action

[cerberus]

I've been messing about with how I do things and seem to have got to a stage where the number of "not responding"/Godaddy block have significantly reduced to the extent that they have become rare for me. It may be that other things have been done to cure this but if this isn't the case I thought it
worth describing what I've done in case this helps in finding a better resolution.

The first thing I tried was switching from PNGs to JPGs to reduce image size, this had no noticeable effect other than to speed up posting.

My next idea was to reduce the number of images on a thread page (10 posts), I was usually getting up to five image posts (25 images at 5 per post) on a page. I've started replying to comments individually now, so a lot of the 10 posts are just text and my images to thread page count has come down to about 15. Since I started doing this I hardly ever encounter the "not responding" issue. The threshold seems to be about the 20 images to a page mark, below this everything is fine and above it the outages start again. Hope this information is useful.