What has Phade been up to?

[Phade]

Hey Everyone!

I’ve decided to start a thread of just the things I have been working on lately so that you know that things are being worked on. It also gives me motivation to keep working on things because I will need to post them here.

Here are some of the things I have done so far this year:

• Created a rough draft of new site rebuild functionality (42 pages of mostly bulleted lists)
  • Listed MVP phase 1 requirements for initial launch
  • Listed phase 2 immediate improvements
  • Detailed new functionality
  • Populate user and video entries from YouTube
  • Autodetect anime and music in AMVs
  • AMV event coordination
  • Entry normalization tools
  • Autodetect AMV strobing/flashing
  • Autodetect AMV watermarks/subtitles
  • Davinci Resolve AMV tools
• Created list of roles and responsibilities for the site
  • Evaluation of frontend vs backend visibility
  • Evaluation of technical vs non-technical skillsets
  • Specific tasks each will be responsible for
  • Prioritized recruitment needs for each position
• Created a Jira board for tracking tasks
  • Enumerated 222 tasks that need to be done
• Created a Confluence board for documentation
  • Created sections for frontend, backend, and general administration
  • Transferred rough draft documentation to each section
• Created and tested an automatic YouTube video entry transfer tool
• Created and presented a speech to Momocon all about the org’s push for improvement and a museum of AMV historical artifacts
• Created and replied to Discord discussions in the Dev Channels (semi-private)
  • How do we attract and manage volunteers?
  • CI/CD Pipeline
  • Microservices vs Monolith Architecture
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Minimum decisions for developer environment

Next up (in no order):

• Document the new site database schema
• Enumerate development processes
• Finalize development priorities
• Create a distributable development environment
• Establish communications standards (Discord, forum, shared documentation, code standards, etc.)
• Create a volunteer signup form

[Phade]

Hey Everyone,

The AI bots have redoubled their scans of the forum from more locations. We have now received more than 7000 individual bots within a contiguous 5-minute span scraping the forum. I have only been able to manually analyze the traffic patterns and set up bans on IP blocks. Most bots are easily spotted by having a contiguous IP range that is owned by a cloud service provider. These providers are from around the world.

However, some bots are now showing up from domestic IP blocks like Amazon and Google cloud services, but also Verizon and T-Mobile. While nobody uses Amazon cloud servers as their home internet provider, Verizon and T-Mobile do. If you are affected by these blocks, I can only suggest that you use a VPN to reach the forum until we come up with a better solution. Eventually, we will have a proper network admin who can set up automated traffic scanning tools. But until then, it's all manual processing as it comes in.

Speaking of which, if you would like to help out the site by being a proper network admin, we would really appreciate the help!

Phade.