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.

[Phade]

Hey Everyone,

I've continued to look into better AI bot-blocking methods. Cloudflare has been offered up as a solution, and while it appears to be promising, it is currently only for sites hosted on Cloudflare servers. There are also mentions of other locally-run solutions, but I am not really a network admin by trade and researching their capabilities vs. our needs is taking a good amount of time. Even then, implementing them will be tedious for me since I will need to learn how to implement them correctly.

As for those affected by the Verizon and T-Mobile blocks, the Opera web browser has a built-in free VPN service that should allow access to the site. Hopefully we will have a better solution sooner than later. Again, if you are a more seasoned network administrator and would like to help us in our time of need, feel free to channel your inner Obi-Wan Kenobi, as you may be our only hope!

Thanks again for being awesome!

Phade.

[Phade]

Hey Everyone!

I'm trying to visualize the internal server structures so that I can create a similar development environment to start coding against. Some of the things that I must consider are the physical servers, virtual server containers, and services within each container. Containers help separate functionality so that they are easier to maintain and update as well as being able to restart sections of the site without having to restart the entire server itself.

I've created a rough draft diagram to help me visualize what needs to be done. The main site container will likely have more open products as services/microservices, but I put in some for now as placeholders. Up next: How to get it done!

[SQ]

Hopefully we will have a better solution sooner than later.

Would you be willing to make the forums viewable only when logging in?
As someone who is affected by this, I would much rather have to log in to view content so I actually have the possibility of seeing it instead of being completely walled out.

[Phade]

Hopefully we will have a better solution sooner than later.

Would you be willing to make the forums viewable only when logging in?
As someone who is affected by this, I would much rather have to log in to view content so I actually have the possibility of seeing it instead of being completely walled out.

Yeah, that is likely what we will change the forum to. I wanted to keep legitimate search engine crawlers available but nuke AI bots. However, since bots seem to be using general domestic ranges now, we should kill anonymous views until a better solution is found. I'll see what I can do!

[Kireblue]

Hopefully we will have a better solution sooner than later.

Would you be willing to make the forums viewable only when logging in?
As someone who is affected by this, I would much rather have to log in to view content so I actually have the possibility of seeing it instead of being completely walled out.

Yeah, that is likely what we will change the forum to. I wanted to keep legitimate search engine crawlers available but nuke AI bots. However, since bots seem to be using general domestic ranges now, we should kill anonymous views until a better solution is found. I'll see what I can do!

I personally don't like this approach because it will limit access to the public pages like the Contest Calendar and CONGRSS Rules

[Phade]

I personally don't like this approach because it will limit access to the public pages like the Contest Calendar and CONGRSS Rules

Perhaps we can keep some forums public while others private?