am i the only one who is driven crazy by this SRC thing lately? mayeb i read too fast but i'm regularly stopped by it. i click in to see a post or two on an old topic. click back to the list of posts, click into another post and bam...i'm stopped. and once it starts happening i can't get it to stop. is there a way to stop it from bothering legitimate users?

Just...click...slow...ly...

I'm with you, I read quickly and get spidered all the time. A real pain for people who d o n 't r e a d s l o wl y.

me three.

tpita

yuk

Hey, I've been complaining for weeks but nobody said "me too" and I was ignored.

I just got it for the first time yesterday, so I hadn't noticed it when you posted before.

Now I got it too.

Can I get a complete description of the phenomenon from someone? I would think it would happen to me more than anyone else, but I realize that many of you read the forums a lot more thoroughly than I do. Is this something that is (exclusively) controlled by my server, or is it perhaps something on the users end (user's provider).

I'll review your responses and then talk to our tech guru, Justin.

-em

If I click too fast between various posts a white screen appears and says:

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The FutureQuest SRC (Spider Rate Control) module will refuse your requests for the next 2.00 seconds.
You have made too many requests per second.
IP: 65.201.131.126
Timestamp: Tue Jun 7 14:22:30 2005 UTC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.gunks.com Port 80

I don't know what causes it but I don't seem to get it elsewhere, although I'm not sure that I use other sites in the same way.

As I said before, I only get it here and I get it on both my home and work computer. I'm pretty sure it's gunks.com related.

what?

huh?

oh, its you dawn...actually it wasnt bugging me last week but it is this week. so...but it hasnt happened for two days now.

Checked into this a bit at FutureQuest. There's not a whole hell of a lot that I can do about this problem. The software controls are for all accounts on FutureQuest, and they're not going to change them. They are designed to keep spidering (ro-)bots from overwhelming the servers. These spidering programs are sent out by sites like Google and Microsoft to help them compile what's out there on the web, for use in their search engines. The bots are apparently poorly written software when it comes to balancing the load on a server. The bots can overwhelm a network server with requests, basically shutting down a site and in my case, over-running my site's bandwidth allowance.

A few months ago, the MSbot used 3x my site's bandwidth allowance, leaving me with a extra $100 to pay to FQ so that the crappy MS-bot could run amok on Gunks.com. It took me a while but I finally found a human at MS to send an email, asking them please to stop. I eventually just blocked the MSbot from the site, so a gunks.com search on MS probably yield a lot less than Google.

But let me ask you all. What is the big inconvenience of having to wait 2.0 seconds to make your next request? Is this really a problem? Does the delay get beyond 2 seconds?

-em

Imagine you're driving down the road and you go to make a right turn and the car stalls. All you have to do is wait 2 seconds and start it again. Then you get to the next corner and it stalls again. Wait 2 seconds. Repeat. It's tedious but I suppose we'll all learn to live with it. I think it started happening when you added the new ads in. Because each ad is a file we have to load, it apparently looks like we're loading a lot of extra files now and it triggers the cutoff. Possibly cleaning up your code to load fewer gifts would help.

good suggestion. The code is pretty sloppy right now. I can upgrade the forum software in a few months and that should clean up quite a lot. But until then, well...

-em