Mods that I think Would be helpful...

Started by Randem, December 10, 2013, 04:35:18 PM

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Randem

Aloha All,

After converting, testing, using and going live with SMF; I have found a few things that could be useful to me.


1 - After going live I noticed that I am getting a lot of brute force attacks to create accounts in SMF. After going thru the account I found some IP addresses and email addresses that I cold ban but this has been a task the way the SMF flow works. What I would like to see is from the members screen that I could select an IP address or group of IP addresses and send it to the ban list from that screen. Currently I have to open two different SMF sessions and ban the IP addresses one at a time; a long and time consuming process when 10's of fake accounts are in the database. Security is set in SMF to the highest so there is nothing I can do further there so to be able to quickly eliminate and ban fake account would be really helpful.

2 - Daily statistics that show the actual page names that user/guest have accessed during the day. I use the pretty URL's mod so using the URL name would be helpful. The reasoning for this is that I want to know just where users are currently going in my forum so that I can better help the users by creating better content and ease of use and other such things for a better use experience and to know what areas to eliminate or improve upon.

This is all for now but whilst doing more testing and checking I am sure I will see more things that can be improved upon. Hopefully this can hel SMF become a better product as well. 8)

PS. If these MODs are already present I would be grateful to a link to them for I have searched and could not find any.
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shadow82x

#1
Quote2 - Daily statistics that show the actual page names that user/guest have accessed during the day. I use the pretty URL's mod so using the URL name would be helpful. The reasoning for this is that I want to know just where users are currently going in my forum so that I can better help the users by creating better content and ease of use and other such things for a better use experience and to know what areas to eliminate or improve upon.
I'm not a developer but something like this would probably have a big hit on performance/the server.
Colin B
Former Spammer, Customize, & Support Team Member

Randem

I am a developer and the performance cost is minimal. It is only a addition to a log file or table. Only the reporting would be a real hit and since only the Admin would be running the report, not much of an issue. I currently have this on my Perl based system but I cannot convert it to php (not a php Developer).

If the log file option is used all data would go to a log file instead of directly to the database. If it is decided to be entered into the database it could be done in bulk later when the system is mostly idle. The system is doing logs anyway with errors and IP Address updates this would not be much different in terms of performance.
BotBanish - The Ultimate Bot Firewall
Scams - How to Protect Yourself
Why Professionals Should Not Use Free Email Accounts

Always ignore those who attempt to tell you what to think and believe those who will allow you think for yourself

Arantor

The performance cost is actually more significant than you would think, and no, not even close is it just the reporting that's a hit.

If it's a pure file log, that does get slower over time as the file gets larger. Unless exclusively locked, which you can't do in this situation anyway, you also risk missing entries if multiple files try to write at the same time.

As far as database tables go, even that's an issue depending on the type of table that you're working on. If it's MyISAM (which is the default in MySQL), you will be creating full table locks when adding a new row, preventing any other reads or writes at that time.

If it's InnoDB, you might find that would work, but you will need to be careful in tuning it.

And of course, this does affect whether you have indexes on the tables, which also add to the performance concerns.

The system does logs with errors - only when errors occur, not on the vast bulk of pages. IP address updates are only carried out if they change, the logging per post is made when the post itself is made, and to be honest it's something that needs changing in future because adding 16 characters per record is untenable in the long term (since it doesn't support IPv6, and adding support for that requires surprising amounts of extra work)

If you really care about this, why not reuse the logs your host may already have in the form of the system access log? Guest access will skew the percentages drastically in any case because invariably the search engines hitting your threads will vastly outmatch the number of real guests, so you can't really rely on that in any situation.
Holder of controversial views, all of which my own.


Randem

On the database issue... I had been doing database development and performance for decades in a real world environment on Wall Street for many years where performance is king, so I think I got that part down, don't need a lesson.

I would get the information from my host logs but they have discontinued the logs. I would use the system that I have been using but the new host does not support Perl and the system mus be converted to php and I am not a php developer. If I wanted to sped the time i could probably convert the system but I really don't want too unless I have no other choice. BTW, search engine information about them hitting the pages is also needed for analysis.
BotBanish - The Ultimate Bot Firewall
Scams - How to Protect Yourself
Why Professionals Should Not Use Free Email Accounts

Always ignore those who attempt to tell you what to think and believe those who will allow you think for yourself

Arantor

Since you know all about performance, and you know all about Perl... learning PHP is basically just a syntactic variation - I'm really not sure what you're expecting from us, since you already seem to have all the answers.

I don't see such a mod being built any time soon, anyone else who cares uses Google Analytics anyway.
Holder of controversial views, all of which my own.


Randem

Arantor Beeblebrox the First,

Tried Google Analytic  and can't seem to get the page visit data. I can get page hit visits but not the page names. And YES, I do have all the answers that I have; it's the answers that i don't have is what I need the help with. Getting the answers that I already have is of no use to me... That is why I only asked the questions ABOUT the answered that I did not already have....
BotBanish - The Ultimate Bot Firewall
Scams - How to Protect Yourself
Why Professionals Should Not Use Free Email Accounts

Always ignore those who attempt to tell you what to think and believe those who will allow you think for yourself

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