Com-Central.net

I have twice in the last few minutes received a 'flood protection' warning when browsing the forum, the last of which said I would be banned on the next occurrence.
I was only looking at a thread, coming out of it and looking at another thread when this happened so what am I doing wrong?

Regards

Dominic

You were clicking your mouse too quickly.

'Flood Protection' is a defense mechinisim that has been put in place to help control 'spambots' - automated devices that crawl through the web gathering information. When they find a site that seems 'interesting' they strat mutiplying and take up many available connections. This inhibits performance for everyone.

You may ask why we don't just block them completely. As I understand it having a certain number of 'bots' roaming your site is good. This is how search engines gather their ionformation. So the trick is to allow them some (controlled) access.

Here at Com-Central they have 'Flood Protection' When a given IP address spawns processes too quickly it sends a warning. If the address continues to spawn processes it blocks that address for up to 15 minutes (if I remember correctly)

What should you do when you see the 'Flood Protection' screen.

1)Read the message - It will tell you how long you have to wait before proceeding. (I think it usually says 5 seconds when I get one). Then sit back and take a sip of coffee or soda. Let the process run it's course. The click the refresh button and the page you expected should appear.

2) If you were impatient and didn't slow down enough and you get the Banned message - Read the message. Then go do something else for a little bit. I believe the default banning is for 15 minutes (I think the message makes appear permanent) If when you come back you still have a problem contact one of the moderators. (I know this can be difficult if you can't reach us through the site ) You can send me email at bsmart [at] xecu.net. I try and check that at least once a day. put an appropriate subject on the message so I don't loose it among the SPAM and let me know what happened and give me an email address and the name you are known by here and I will pass it on to the system admins and they should be able to work it out.

Yes that sounds like a cumbersome process. But we are guests here and it has been a pretty civilized place (even with the hogs and the skwirrels ) And anyone who has been around long enough to remember the demise of the old discussion group when the spammers got the upper hand will agree that eternal vigilence is the price we pay for surfing free

OK Bob, thanks for explanation. Will click more slowly in future!

Dominic

- bsmart

But we are guests here and it has been a pretty civilized place (even with the hogs and the skwirrels )

If the skwirrels get to click once, that's once too many. Now that's being civilized!