Cap'n Refsmmat

Where I live, it's common for people to rent an apartment and be astonished by their electric bill in the winter, because they didn't notice the apartment has electric resistance heat. (Not a heat pump, just a giant toaster.) They tend to make confused posts online, somewhat like the BBC article, quoting the total cost but no other information about usage and pricing. As electricity prices rise, electric resistance heat will get disproportionately more expensive.

The traffic seems to have actually ramped up in early December, which resulted in us getting unplugged for a couple of days. However, the hosting service didn't tell us the reason and just turned the site back on without explanation, giving us no chance to understand what was going on before they pulled the plug again.

Hard to say. When I searched around, I found a thread on reddit describing an essentially identical attack (same countries, same User-Agent). Nobody's emailed us demanding ransom or anything like that, and it wasn't nearly big enough to actually overwhelm a decent server. Feels like the low-level background radiation of the Internet.

On Monday morning we were notified that Invision, who make the software and also provided the hosting, were kicking us off their hosting. Apparently SFN was attracting a denial-of-service attack that was costing them money to deal with, and instead of trying to filter it out, they just cancelled our service. Dave and I thus spent some time switching to a new (cheaper!) hosting service and getting everything hooked up again. We're back, though a few things will probably still be broken from the move. I suspect notification emails won't be working right now, and I disabled registration for the time being so we can fix the email system. If you notice anything else weird, let us know. (oh, and we already filtered out the denial-of-service attack, which involved several megabits per second of requests to the All Activity page)

I have approved your request. (Which is also helpful so we understand what happens when we use this feature.)

I just found a "Spam Analysis" feature that oddly didn't turn up the last time I searched for "spam" in the admin panel. I've turned it on, and allegedly "any content submissions made by a user with less than 5 posts, or dormant users who have not posted in 6 months, will be analyzed for potential spam". Highly likely spam will be blocked and possible spam will be held in the mod queue. There's another page with spam statistics, and it claims to have blocked 54 known spammers from registering so far this month. That includes 29 marked "known spammer" just yesterday. But it seems very inconsistent from day to day.

I just logged in to look at the spam settings and saw there was an update available. Coincidentally, the update has a new CAPTCHA option (Cloudflare Turnstile). I switched to that, so let's see if it makes any difference.

Unfortunately I don't see a setting to control it. Ideally it would only auto-recognize links starting with https://, but there's no setting for that.

I'll take this opportunity to point out that yes, bulleted lists with emojis are a feature of LLM output, and yes, LLMs have a distinctive writing style. Oddly enough this is one of my research areas now, collaborating with an English professor who knows how to quantify various features of writing style. We wrote a paper (free preprint) where we generated a corpus of LLM and human writing. ChatGPT, for instance, really loves participial phrases and an information-dense style: lots of nouns, noun phrases, and nominalizations (things like "development", where the verb "develop" is turned into a noun). They're features that display authority. More recently I looked at formatting, and while I don't have full results, the more recent models seem to particularly love using bold, bullet points, and sub-headings. I should add some code to count emojis.

Looks like bad design: the counter showing the number of upvotes gets in the way. But if you click on the heart symbol directly, you'll upvote the post, even if you can't reach the arrow. So this mainly stops you from downvoting, and we can call that a feature to encourage positivity.

It looks like what you copied is a heading. Under the ¶ menu, try changing it from "Heading 1" down to "Paragraph".

Hmm. The AdminCP won't let me change the sitemap URL settings, I think due to a bug. I'll have to ask Invision to look into it.

I just looked at the graph: The last day is today, which of course isn't over yet, so it's too low. We're a little lower than a few weeks ago, but there wasn't a sudden drop. Maybe there's a longer, slower drop happening?

I'm not sure what changed, but you should see that quote boxes are working again. The JavaScript file that wasn't loading now loads correctly, despite nothing obvious changing. For LaTeX, we're using a very old version of MathJax. At some point I'll experiment with switching to the latest version and then see why it might sometimes not work. I wonder if it works when content is loaded fresh, but when it's loaded dynamically (like when you go to the next page of a thread) it's not re-run to convert all the math code. Also, there was a problem with our email sending setup that Invision has now fixed for us. You should receive email notifications and password resets correctly now.

You can adjust this in your settings: https://scienceforums.net/settings/links/ Under "Content Preferences", you can choose whether links in unread content take you to the beginning, end, or to the unread part. Yeah, I think this is the same bug that's affecting quotes and some other things -- the language file the JavaScript code uses to fill in English text is not loading, so everything fills in blank. Working with Invision support now to figure that out.

Invision uses Cloudflare as their CDN, and they're known for frequently doing this. It seems to be an issue for certain browsers, operating systems, or ISPs that Cloudflare thinks are suspicious or that match the profile of bots they try to block. Are you using your phone's standard browser or something else?

I think I've figured out the cause of the quoting issue, as well as other issues where text doesn't show up when it's supposed to (like blank alert windows and buttons). A JavaScript file with translation text for everything isn't being loaded correctly. Unfortunately I can't tell how to fix it, so I'm going to send it to Invision to figure out.

I haven't figured out what's going on with quotes yet. They're definitely supposed to contain the name of the user being quoted, so something is wrong. I may have to ask Invision's support to figure it out.

I found the setting to change how the front page forums are listed and switched it to the old view. There are a couple other new options I can play with, but for now this looks much better.

The ubiquitous three-horizontal-line menu is called a hamburger menu: I too yell at the same clouds. I'm going to see if there's a template change that can reduce this, at least for the forum list on the front page where the image slots are all empty.

Earlier today I made a change to our email configuration. (Previously our DNS listed our old server as the only host allowed to send email from scienceforums.net, so emails from the new service were more likely to be flagged as spam.) If any of you get notification emails from SFN, can you let me know if you've received any in the past 6 hours or so, or receive any soon? That would help check if something is broken with the email sending.

I don't have a tablet handy right now, but do you have the hamburger menu somewhere? That opens a navigation menu with the activity link:

It's up at the top: And yeah, I agree the forum icons are a bit silly. I'll see if that can be adjusted in the settings.

Should be fixed now. I'll need to tweak it, since it's an old version of MathJax, but it should behave the same as the old system now. I can't find any settings about this -- not sure if it was removed in the new version or what. It looks like Invision is opposed to a feature like that because the numbers would change if posts are deleted, threads are merged, etc. That's a rare enough case, but I guess they don't want to do it.

Ah, yes, that's something to fix. I think we lost that in the theme migration, so we can look at adding the code back in.