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ZacFields
03-31-2007, 12:23 PM
Hello To All,

I figured I would update everyone on the current condition of CR:U. First I'll have you know that I came very close to some rash decisions in the last couple days, including wiping out CR:U completely and saving my money and time. This was because over the last couple days I had been staying up til 5am, and spending my ENTIRE days trying to deal with our recent hacker issue. I was getting tired of messing with it and getting basically nowhere...and as I said I came very close to completely scrapping the site.

Ty (a good friend of mine that has always been willing to help me with these problems) and I continued working on it, though. Ty was working on it all night and I was working on it all day. So we were essentially under construction 24 hours a day since about sunday.

It's been a long week... but here is the final results:

Hackers
There were 4 of them. To gain access to the site they used several hundred web servers that they had already hacked into. This is why a few of you may have gotten banned recently on accident. I was trying to keep up with all the IP's they were hitting me from and accidentally banned a few legitimate users. The hackers have been gone since about Monday, but ever since then up until yesterday they were still hitting me with DDOS attacks with several hundred IP addresses.

USER IP's being banned
As I said a moment ago I was trying to ban IP addresses that were attacking us and not legitimate users. I believe, however, that I have fixed the problem and everyone should be accounted for now. If anyone tells you (starting now) that their IP is banned, have them email their IP address to me at owner@crunderground.com and make sure they know we don't need their computer's IP we need their router's IP.

Foreign IP's being banned
This morning I blocked all international IP ranges with the exception of the IP ranges that SandMansSI has posted from in Australia. CR:U is now an internet "fortress of America." I decided that nobody outside the US really needs access to CR:U anyways because 90% of them just want to hack.

Search engine spiders banned
This one really kills me to do, but the search engines are killing our page load times. I like that people can access information on CR:U from the internet but I just can't allow them in anymore. They ignore parts of the robots.txt file which restricts them from doing things like searching the forums (which is very resource consuming). They are now restricted from entering the site.

So essentially, now we have a CR:U just for you guys. We're still available on search results but within a few months we'll start to drop off there. So the only people accessing this site should be people from iowa and people who heard about the site from us.

Now I'm going to get some rest. I hope that answers all of your questions.

Zac

DustinsDuster
03-31-2007, 03:12 PM
let me be the first to tell you Zac that i (and everyone else im sure) really appreciate all the work you put into this place. i dont know what i would do without it i spend so much time on here...

the search engine deal does kindof suck, but i dont see why a guy in florida needs to join CR:u. besides, im sure most people who joined here found out about it through word of mouth anyway.

thanks again man!

Ricky
04-01-2007, 01:10 PM
i dont know what i would do with out cru.

melhoneybee
04-01-2007, 05:01 PM
too bad about the search engine thing..

also that advertisements on the sides are gone.. wasn't CRU getting money for amount of hits they got..

ZacFields
04-01-2007, 05:40 PM
Thanks guys for your sympathies and kind words. Yeah we had google ads running before. It will be harder to get any good ads since I can't allow googlebot on the site anymore so I decided not to put it back up for now.

I've loaded up a copy of CRU onto my laptop with XAMPP and i'm going to try and do some database/php optimizing while I'm at work. Perhaps if I can strip the forum down enough that the pageloads are a little better and queries are down, we might be able to let the search engines back in and maybe get the google ads back.

We'll see.

Zac

96-eclipse-gst
04-01-2007, 10:11 PM
Zac, Next time I see you, your gonna get the biggest hug! So If you can't remember the person who run's up and hugs you next, its me! (Back off Ashley, he's MINE!!!!!) J/K

Inferno333
04-01-2007, 10:24 PM
Zac is the man!

Ashley
04-01-2007, 11:57 PM
Zac, Next time I see you, your gonna get the biggest hug! So If you can't remember the person who run's up and hugs you next, its me! (Back off Ashley, he's MINE!!!!!) J/K

pff you can take him.

kiddinggg. maybe.

DragonUSMC
04-02-2007, 01:02 PM
Well without google ads and such i think this is a perfect opertunity for CRU and local business to finally come together in a more meaningful relationship.

Let them advertise for a small fee, maybe get some CRU member cards and such. Local buisnesses already stress offering CRUmembers discounts. Now we can advertise that seeing we are strictly advertising to our group. just a thought.

Sorry you had to deal with this crap zac.

TurboZ28
04-02-2007, 05:06 PM
Foreign IP's being banned
This morning I blocked all international IP ranges with the exception of the IP ranges that SandMansSI has posted from in Australia. CR:U is now an internet "fortress of America." I decided that nobody outside the US really needs access to CR:U anyways because 90% of them just want to hack.

Zac


That sucks for me! I go over seas alot.

ZacFields
04-03-2007, 12:51 AM
^ Not to worry.

I should have mentioned that I am also slowly learning about server security so once I have things more under control I will lift that block.

If you're going overseas and you find out that you're not able to log into the site, it should provide you with an email address. Just email me and tell me where you are and I will definitely lift the ban on your area.

Zac

ZacFields
04-03-2007, 01:25 AM
*UPDATE*

Wanted to let you guys know I have spend COUNTLESS hours trying to find ways to optimize the website to get better pageloads. For the most part, I am seeing 1-2 second pageloads. This is a definitely a good thing.

Soon I may experiment with letting the spiders back in and whatnot. We'll see. Pageloads are better right now than they have ever been. I have never seen a pageload under 2 seconds on this website in its' entire existance. So among the changes I made, whether it be overall or one specific change, I have succeeded in squaring away the pageload problem.

Now as long as we can keep the hackers out we should be good. Damn it has been a long couple weeks.

Zac

Juggernaut
04-03-2007, 07:07 AM
[quote="ZacFields";p="123659":1d9cb]

Foreign IP's being banned
This morning I blocked all international IP ranges with the exception of the IP ranges that SandMansSI has posted from in Australia. CR:U is now an internet "fortress of America." I decided that nobody outside the US really needs access to CR:U anyways because 90% of them just want to hack.

Zac


That sucks for me! I go over seas alot.[/quote:1d9cb]
Ditto.. like Iraq and Germany and Turkey... but ohwell as long as the hacking stops.

ZacFields
04-03-2007, 01:59 PM
Juggernate and TurboZ28, a friend of mine also informed me after seeing your posts that there are american proxies you could use to see the site just fine. I will have to take a look at a few proxy options but basically you just bounce your signal from iraq off of one of these proxies and you can view the site just fine. They're really simple to use.

But again, there may come a time when I lift that ban once I get SQL running like a champ. I have already done an amazing amount of work to it and I hope everyone is noticing the quick page-loads already.

Zac

Juggernaut
04-03-2007, 07:01 PM
Juggernate and TurboZ28, a friend of mine also informed me after seeing your posts that there are american proxies you could use to see the site just fine. I will have to take a look at a few proxy options but basically you just bounce your signal from iraq off of one of these proxies and you can view the site just fine. They're really simple to use.

But again, there may come a time when I lift that ban once I get SQL running like a champ. I have already done an amazing amount of work to it and I hope everyone is noticing the quick page-loads already.

Zac
Thanks... Last time I was overseas I got to use the internet alot.