Site Problems - Explained

[Dobber]

Since I'm getting a ton of these in the forum, I'll just provide a full post here.

We are upgrading the sites. All of them. The forum was done as of February. Now the main sites are being upgraded.

DobberHockey was done on Sunday, but took three days to clean up the issues. These are now all fixed except for, I believe, the 'view full site' option at the bottom of the mobile version. DobberFootball will be done by tomorrow and obviously will have fewer issues since we learned from what happened with hockey


On top of that, hackers exploited a weakness in DobberFootball and anytime I submitted an article, the site would slow down and start spamming 1000s of random emails. This took a day to fix.

On top of that, because my server is so messy with three or four versions of my sites - double that for the test environment - my server was getting full. I got a temporary addition to the size so that's okay. BUT, I did not think to handle the backup. The backup was trying to run but there was more than what I paid for. The sites crashed this morning, all of them, for about three hours it was very slow or completely crashed. The backup process was stopped.



Known Issues:

1. Mobile doesn't have 'view full site' option. We'll get to it
2. DobberHockey.com wasn't working. It wasn't forwarding. This impacted registration, Frozen Pool, sales, and logins, plus the look of the site if you typed dobberhockey.com. This is now fixed. So you can go back to dobberhockey.com if you want.
3. Rankings button were not working if you were logged in. This is now fixed
4. Commenting on the website uses your Name instead of User Name. This is now fixed
5. The sites were slow and crashed a lot this morning between 10am and 1pm ET. This was due to the backups trying to run. Fixed.


Bear with me - almost there!

[Pengwin7]

Bear with me - almost there!

OK!
Random parent note of the day.
Bear with Me is actually a very good book if you have one kid and might be bringing a baby home as #2.

[Axeman33]

She's still a little glitchy. I am still having issues from time to time.

[The Bottlenecker]

I am not complaining, and will still promote this site and continue to use it, BUT, I am still finding things slow, some of my posts are being posted two or three times, and I am not always able to readily open threads without refreshing the page.

As a computer nincompoop, is there something I need to reset or do to get my usually stable site back. Thanks!

[evans334]

I am not complaining, and will still promote this site and continue to use it, BUT, I am still finding things slow, some of my posts are being posted two or three times, and I am not always able to readily open threads without refreshing the page.

As a computer nincompoop, is there something I need to reset or do to get my usually stable site back. Thanks!

CTRL-F5

Will refresh the page and re-download from scratch, not from whatever cache you browser has saved locally.

Other than that, not much. Would suggest using a browser like Firefox or Chrome, not Internet Explorer.

[doulos]

I am not complaining, and will still promote this site and continue to use it, BUT, I am still finding things slow, some of my posts are being posted two or three times, and I am not always able to readily open threads without refreshing the page.

As a computer nincompoop, is there something I need to reset or do to get my usually stable site back. Thanks!

Things are much improved for me this morning. I would suggest clearing your cache and then trying again just in case.

[Dobber]

This site was a victim of a DDOS attack. I had at one time 120,000 "users" on the site at once. This server can handle a TON, but not that much. It slowed to a crawl and crashed. On and off for 24 hours before we found it.

Frankly, I'm not convinced we're out of the woods yet, but it's been good for two or three hours now.

[Axeman33]

I dont know what a DDOS attack is, but I am sure it ain't fun to deal with.

[The Bottlenecker]

Things seem to be back to normal as my last two attempts have gone off much more smoothly than anything I did in the last 24 hours. Thanks.

[doulos]

I dont know what a DDOS attack is, but I am sure it ain't fun to deal with.

Distributed Denial of Service. The most common way (and it sounds like the one Dobberhockey experienced) to do this is to flood a website with communication requests, to the point where it can't handle any more and slows right down or crashes. Not nice.

[ericdaoust]

Kind of like some viruses that slow down an individual computer to a crawl...

[Axeman33]

Any way to trace it back to where it originated?

[gainerama]

It's the most common type of website cyber attack. Hacker sends out virus at an earlier date through a bunch of different avenues online. The virus stays hidden on random computers all over the world and go into dormant mode. Hacker decides to use the virus at a later date and uses a program to slave all the infected computers to take instructions and communicate with a specific internet site at the same time. Kind of like waking up 100k computers at once and telling them all to visit Dobberhockey at the exact same time to block all internet traffic at the website with massive online congestion.

[Savvy1982]

It's the most common type of website cyber attack. Hacker sends out virus at an earlier date through a bunch of different avenues online. The virus stays hidden on random computers all over the world and go into dormant mode. Hacker decides to use the virus at a later date and uses a program to slave all the infected computers to take instructions and communicate with a specific internet site at the same time. Kind of like waking up 100k computers at once and telling them all to visit Dobberhockey at the exact same time to block all internet traffic at the website with massive online congestion.

So what was the point?

Are they after credit card info. from those of us who bought the Fantasy Guide?

Or is it Revenge from Hockey Forecaster Magazine, as Dobber is putting their publication out of business?

[gainerama]

No they got different type of spyware to collect financial info. If they're after your credit card info, the last thing the hacker wants to do is alert anyone that they have access. These type of cyber attacks are usually some kid pulling a prank or doing it just because he can and wants to be a dick about it.