Gallery Permissions

[wdmartin]

I just noticed that it's no longer possible for people who aren't logged in to view images in my galleries, or things that I included in posts from my gallery. That never used to be a problem. I suspect a version upgrade has rejiggered the permissions, or something like that.

What do I need to do in order make it possible for anyone to view my images, even if they're not logged in?

[Diamond]

Hmm. I'm not sure. I don't handle the technical side of things, so let me ask Robbie and/or the other admins.

[Diamond]

As I said, I'm not proficient in the technical side, but here's a response from someone who is:

Yes that was a change we (or more specifically I) made about 6 months ago because we had innumerable guest spamming going on. I think if you look at the who's online you see about 10,000 guests all basically trawling all of the images on the site to train AI.

Right now its:

4 members and 2102 guests
Most users ever online was 38376, 07-15-2024

So about that time we had to do something to put off all of the 38,000 bots downloading all of the images. It was slowing down the site and we had all those TCP timeouts and failures to render a page and the server was running out of sockets because there is a 65535 socket limit and they get reused but it takes a few minutes to recycle them.

If this were my server I would nuke some of the IP ranges but I am not a root admin on the box. We have the 47.76.x.x on the forum block list so they all get the yellow triangles but in order for the forum to know this they have already made the web connection and used up the socket.

Were basically under a continual DDOS from the AI companies because were a bunch of creators.