Thanks, guys...

It happens ocasionally. It happened to me again about a half hour ago. At first I thought those A-holes banned all the members somehow. As you can see I'm back in now so I guess it will be a minor annoyance for a while.

Hey, Jeff... how'd they post so many messages so quickly? Did they exploit some loophole in the forum software or something? They had posted as m any as 3 messages a second at one point.

No, it's not an exploit, I just didn't have the function that protects against it turned on because I tend to trust people to behave, and I tend to fire off a lot of messages in a short period of time myself. Besides, there were actually several kids involved, so it might not have mattered anyway.

They were clearly the type that get beat up a lot and stuffed in lockers in high school. They lash out online because it's the only voice they have. It's a sad way to live, but I think most people grow out of it (save for a couple of grown-up tools in the enthusiast community).

You can can count me in on those that can't get in via my regular server. I get the banned notice on AOL,too. Got on via Internet Explorer. Frankly I'm disgusted by the imature actions of theses "children", and I hope they have reciveived an rude awakening from their actions.

I think it was the same effect as when someone does a double post( clicks on the reply button multiple times) , but I could be wrong.

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I got a very Nasty PM from one of these people. Sigh.

I was kind of being an idiot too, sry 'bout that, I was just in a horrible mood, and then I came on and saw this guy trying to ruin the forums, and I got pretty pissed off eventually. I couldn't control myself. I'm Happy that Jeff got a benefit out of it though, I'm also happy that this huge mess has been cleaned up and I can start posting after my horrendously long absense.

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coasterqueenTRN said:
Somebodys' parents are going to be pissed today. ;-)
quote]

The BEST revenge may be living well, but watching that kid explain this to his parents, that's GOT to be a close second...*feeling especially evil today*....;)

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Yea, a number of people I know notice the spamming so we just started a chat on AIM. But hey its cool you acually made money off of it Jeff!

A few questions

1 Jeff can you look into the ban notice some of us are getting?

2 How are their parents going to even find out? Was that traceable?

3 How could that one kid post all those "historical facts"so quickly? For those who didn't see the mess one kid was post bio's of different people and they were a page long.

4 Is Cedar Point running out of space cause they should have plenty once Magnum finishes sinking. Just kidding.

1. I don't have to look into the problem, I created it. You're in a block of AOL addresses that included the problem kids.

2. First of all, you're not really anonymous on the Internet, and a couple if these idiots registered with AOL accounts. Between the two, it's pretty easy to trace it, and AOL's abuse department is generally more likely to do something for you when you have that much info. Even if they used Hotmail addreses, it's still easy to match the IP with the time they were logged in. ISP's keep all of that info. Another kid had a Verizon DSL address, which is fun because not only can you trace back to the customer (and potentially hack their machine if it isn't secure), but some of the host names actually have the town they live in.

3. You can use automation programs to attack a site. There's not much you can do about that, it's just something you deal with. I used one to test the performance of the site before deploying it. I created hundreds of user accounts and made thousands of posts in a relatively short time in my tests.

4. Dragster is propping Magnum back up, so it's all good.

Aww shoot... I miss all the fun! :(

I thought the weight of Wicked Twister at the otehr end of the beach was what was stopping Magnum from sinking. Hmm, learn something new everyday I guess!

jimmybob - late to the party as usual...

They added those extra supports to WT because it was sinking also.

I just wish I saw what happened. I admit to being completely in the dark here. I was too busy putting my roof back on my house after our evil windstorm here in the NW. Is there a link to the mess? Wondering...

basically there was (i think around 23 pages before i finally refreshed and they were gone) worth of spam messages repeated over and over and over.... stupid kids. at least you didn't get pissed off by it! I was just saying to myself, ohhhh no jeff is gonna freak out :-P...

at least all is well again.

So its ok for a site owner to hack into a user's computer??

Jeff didn't say he's going to, just that the idiot kids were so traceable that doing so would be POSSIBLE. I don't suggest anyone actually doing so.

To give a quick summary for people who didn't realize how traceable your online activities are:

Every computer connected to the internet has an Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned. This is (currently) a 32-bit number that's usually written out as a quad-dot notation (for example, 192.168.1.1 -- each number is 0-255, which is 8 bits. 8 bits * 4 = 32 bits). Some computers are assigned the same address at all times, others are dynamically assigned an address from a pool when they connect to the internet. In many cases, a group of computers shares the same public IP address through address translation (NAT).

Every time you access this, or any other site, your computer's public IP address and the time are logged. Every time you connect to your service provider, they log the address that's assigned to your computer (if it isn't already static).

Between those logs, it's a very simple matter to report abuse (which is exactly why hacking back isn't a good idea).

Now, for the people who are having some problems, what's happening is that part of the steps Jeff took last night to shut the problem down was to ban a range of AOL addresses (see "assigned from a pool", above). Unfortunately, even innocent users who try to connect and end up with an address from that pool will be unable to connect to CB.

*** Edited 12/8/2003 2:34:14 AM UTC by GregLeg***

Of course not. Then again, that's not what Jeff said.

Are you saying we should take turns and do this often ? ;)

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SFDL_Dude said:
basically there was (i think around 23 pages before i finally refreshed and they were gone) worth of spam messages repeated over and over and over.... stupid kids. at least you didn't get pissed off by it! I was just saying to myself, ohhhh no jeff is gonna freak out :-P...

at least all is well again.

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Adding to this , they were also making offensive jokes. Plus it was 36 pages when the dust finally cleared.

Just immature teens with a sad knowledge of the world....

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SFDL_Dude said:
at least you didn't get pissed off by it! I was just saying to myself, ohhhh no jeff is gonna freak out.

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I think you grossly overestimate how much something like that bothers me (that's the mistake the kiddies made).