When I publish a post here, the site overloads in just seconds. Often before the WP editing page can update. Then users are quickly locked out as the site hits CPU, memory, and I/O use limits. The really annoying part is I too am locked out of WP Admin.

Ready For Battle

With PHP processes maxed out and being created faster than I can kill them, it’s a problem. The quick fix is to shut the site down. So, you see a page saying the site is temporarily closed. This is not a good option.  Continue reading →

Let me know if you start having problems with this site. I have been upgrading the security. About 2 or 3 PM each day I see the site slammed by remote sites sucking gigabytes of content out of my site. I’m not sure why they would want it. Nor do I mind that they take it. I do mind that they overload the web server I use and make the site way slow. So, I come in each day and disconnect those that are behaving like bots… continuous dozens-of-requests per second.

On The Sunny Side of the Street

I’ve been changing robots.txt and adding ‘slow down’ instructions for search engines. That helps with the big well mannered engines. But, not the problem bots that have been hitting.

I’ve been blocking the networks the most abusive bots use. But, doing that without restricting legitimate users is complicated. So, it isn’t a good solution. Neither is blocking individual IP addresses. The bad guys just change IP.

So, now I am trying some new software. It is in learning mode. So, I’m ‘completely’ sure what all it will decide to do.

The blog Mesh Body Addicts is making the news. SL Blogger Support (Canary Beck) has an article about its success, 85,000 page views per month. The article is about blogs that serve a niche.  See: How one Second Life blogger niched her blog.

Um certo cais
A certain pier

Thinking about the idea of making a niche blog they omit a major point. In a changing world, your niche may, likely will, become passé or vanish altogether. I used to cover viewers in great detail. If a person was considering changing to a new viewer, this was the blog to read before changing. But, with the arrival of Oz Linden and enforcement of the ‘shared experience’ concept the Lab has pretty much taken control of viewer development. The whole field of viewer development changed, at least for what it means to me. Continue reading →

A new version of WordPress is out (4.2.3). It is a security update. I want to install it. That means I am backing up my blog so I can unwind the update if I have to. I learned long ago that depending on the hosting company’s backups is too risky.

This means the blog may be down for a few minutes or maybe just glitchy now and then. I have over 12,000 files to download and the database. It takes some time.