Postby shooraijin » Sun Sep 21, 2003 12:47 pm
Authentication is accomplished through cookies, so, unfortunately, trolls are likely entering through (technically speaking) legit channels where they must provide a real username and password -- at least those who post. Those who lurk, of course, can always be guest.
What this will cut down on is "phantom" guests from web bots that blindly follow all links. I remember Shiroi one day telling me about one particular bot (an IP trace revealed it to be Inktomi) that was hitting all the 'Report Post' and 'IP: Logged' links at the bottom of all the posts, and to add insult to injury, we were able to track four separate instances of the robot (possibly more, but we just saw four IP addresses from the same netblock) doing the same thing simultaneously on multiple different areas. That really makes it hard to track activity, and is unnecessary CPU burden on this server (which really seems to have points of time during the day when access is just glacial).
Once the noise from legitimate, if misguided, automatic web crawlers is filtered out by telling them to stay away, we can then respect any guest count out there as a more reliable figure of how much lurking activity from outsiders there is, and see if that correlates with increases in troll appearances.
"you're a doctor.... and 27 years.... so...doctor + 27 years = HATORI SOHMA" - RoyalWing, when I was 27
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I could still be champ, but I'd feel bad taking it away from one of the younger guys. - George Foreman