by alloneword » Fri Jan 19, 2024 3:37 pm
FYI:
The last time this happened (that I'm aware of, at least), the main cause was identified as a particularly ill-mannered Chinese search engine that was indexing the ~5 GB of text that makes up the RI database.
The remedy was to identify the user agent / IP range of the offending entity and give it a taste of the almighty ban-hammer. This was all that was/is available with the available tools (the phpbb Admin Panel).
The issues are, however, indicative of a deeper problem: The board software, the operating system and the components it sits on date back to September 2012, and to my knowledge have not been updated since then. The fact that it is all still here and running at all is testament to the abilities of the person (drew!) who initially put it together over a decade ago. I am truly astonished every time I see that it is.
Unfortunately, the login credentials to the RI server that would be required to perform an update are unavailable. At this point in time, it's actually doubtful that such an update could even be performed, so a 'bare metal' install would be required. In light of this, should it be desired that the existing database (and all the posts therein) be preserved or retained, the only option would be to take the existing database (assuming that it can be exported intact - at ~5 GB that would present it's own challenges) and load that into an instance of phpbb 3.x running on a local machine, then carefully walk that up through the phpbb updates, one at a time, to the current version. Then re-export the database again and upload it to a freshly installed phpbb running on an up-to-date operating system (either on the current - Jeff's - server or elsewhere).
I'm sure that others share in my deep gratitude to Jeff for having paid the hosting fees for so long (not to mention keeping me slightly saner during these past few 'interesting' years with his twitter posts), but I'm equally sure that I'm not the only one who has wondered how long his generosity can (or even should) continue in this regard.
