Making sure you're not a bot!

[leggysman]

We're trying out anubis.

If you briefly see a page showing a cartoon girl, before your page loads, that's our bot blocker at work. It challenges your browser to solve a math problem using javascript, which tends to be a problem for the dingbat bots.

Once that's done, your browser gets a cookie that lasts for several days, and you shouldn't see that screen again until the cookie expires / gets deleted or you switch devices.

As we speak I'm watching the number of "guest users" (mostly bots) drop by an order of magnitude. So I guess it's working.

[leggysman]

I have received one report of problems when trying to send PMs - getting that screen and then (sounds like) being sent back to an empty PM compose page. Has anyone else encountered this?

[WarrenOldcuck]

Hi Leggysman, firstly, I highly rate your posts and so glad you are a site admin, congratulations. One thing is really baffling me and I wondered if you could help me out....How do users manage to get part quotes in yellow from another poster when they are replying to them? I've tried all ways and can't work it out and I spent over 30 years in IT! Many thanks

[leggysman]

Thank you.

If you push the [ " ] button at the top of any post, it will give you some BBcode that looks like this:

Code: Select all

[quote=WarrenOldcuck post_id=1619525 time=1784130181 user_id=125534]
Hi Leggysman,  firstly, I highly rate your posts and so glad you are a site admin, congratulations.
One thing is really baffling me and I wondered if you could help me out....How do users manage
to get part quotes in yellow from another poster when they are replying to them?  I've tried all ways
and can't work it out and I spent over 30 years in IT!  Many thanks
[/quote]

You can copy and paste that whole thing into any post of yours, or edit it to take just an excerpt you want to quote, or highlight any passage. And you can put text of your own either before or after the quote tag

[WarrenOldcuck]

Thank you so much

[johnswan]

Hi Leggysman, firstly, I highly rate your posts and so glad you are a site admin, congratulations. One thing is really baffling me and I wondered if you could help me out....How do users manage to get part quotes in yellow from another poster when they are replying to them? I've tried all ways and can't work it out and I spent over 30 years in IT! Many thanks

Doing it on a phone though, is a major pita!

Which is why you often get those posts where someone quotes the whole of a huge previous post, and then just adds a single sentence, or less, of their own!

You can even do multiple quotes in one post, but that gets really difficult on a phone.

The important thing is to make sure you only edit the text that's part of the quote. If you accidentally delete the code, or even one character of it, then it's best that you just start again.

It's a bit of a learning curve. But it's worth it.

Hope you don't mind me butting in!

[Guhunkadorn]

I sent a PM to a member a few hrs ago and it is in my 'out' box, but not appearing in my 'Sent' box. The message int eh out box indicates that it was sent.....just curious why it's not in the 'Sent' box.

[leggysman]

It's just the way the forum software works. The message doesn't get 'sent' anywhere; it's just the same as a post, but private. It stays in the 'Outbox' folder until it's been read by the recipient, then moves to 'Sent'

[Jujube]

I get this all the time and it doesn’t go away, just keeps “calculating “. It’ll even come up when advancing a page. It just erased this message, made me do it all over again! Frustrating!

[leggysman]

I'm sorry to hear it's causing you trouble. Sounds like you're changing IP addresses frequently. Are you using something like Tor?

It shouldn't take long to calculate the hash, unless you're using some old, slow device... I see it frequently (because I use a VPN and Tor), but it's usually only for a moment.

But, bottom line: the bots were absolutely killing the site, making it completely unusable. And Anubis has solved the problem - So this is here to stay for the time being. Happy to try and figure it out with you though; how we could possibly make the experience better for you.

[leggysman]

Weren't you also having troubles with the cookies (IIRC) for a possibly similar reason (your IP changing frequently)? And you were using an older iPhone?