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.

[wdmartin]

Hrm! Well, that's certainly a good reason for it.

A pity, though. I suspect that a lot of casual visitors coming in off web searches will just leave rather than go to the trouble of creating an account so they can view the images.

[Redrobes]

I would have thought so too but I have the stats now. Breaking 2024 into two groups. One (A) from jan 1st to end of June (6 months) and the other (B) from start of Aug to end of year (5 months) such that we dismiss July where all of this kicked off and the change was made we have:

Number of users who signed up... A: 3923 B: 9145
However, the number of users who made it through the sign up process and made at least 1 post... A: 97 and B: 80
That means 11550 users signed up but did not complete the process - I.e. spammers. Then there were a few more that signed up and got through the process and then either never spammed or we booted out. But we have a 11500:177 spammer to legit ratio. Or 1.5% of people who sign up are legit and 98.5% of signups are spam bots.

Anyway to answer the question, since 97 signed up in 6 months before the change vs 80 in 5 months after the change it means we have a 97:96 ratio of whether it affected our legit user signup. And so we can pretty conclusively say - no - it made no difference.

I think people come here because they want to and engage with us regardless of the hype of the pretty images. Which is why I think were a great place to hang out and the last of the great forums where people can exchange views without the general nastiness of the rest of the internet.

Not much of the stats are too surprising but the uptick in signups without completion shows that were under increased spamming attack. In 2023 we had 9152, in 2022 it was 5240, 2021 it was 2393, 2020 it was 5225 but that was covid year. In 2019 it was 1505. So as you can see we now about 10x amount of bots signing up to spam us now compared to the 2019 era. And were not 10x more popular as a site. This is more likely to be about a 10x increase in available bandwidth that everybody has access to. The bots just run faster. I am seeing a similar up tick in other website traffic that I manage. The internet has become unimaginably toxic over the last few years.

One last point to make if you are a guest wanting to sign up. Since we have 98.5% bot signup then its best to not be too weird or do anything too unusual in the signup until you're in or have 5 posts. Because we cant see the wood for the trees.

The other thing which has occurred to me form these stats is that this whole site and forum probably only has between 6 months and 2 years left before it will get overwhelmed by spam and AI.