I understand why this is neccessary but can we get the threashold bumped up a bit. I can never get through the daily unread messages before I get punished.
I've played with and tuned the thresholds to be as tolerant as I can to achieve a fine balance between stopping those that wish to abuse the bandwidth of contribs.org and not blocking those that are here to just view the site.
Just to give you some numbers for the last week:
4,265,842 hits
22,674 blocks (0.5% of all hits)
10,760 blocks to non-abusers (0.25% of all hits)
That would mean that you are in the very small minority. Looking through the logs you seem to be requesting a new page about every 2-3 seconds for 2-3 minutes straight. That is some extremely fast reading on your part.
The limiting/blocking measures have cut the total bandwidth drain on contribs to about 1/10 what it was a year ago. Most of that bandwidth drain was people trying to mirror/suck/scrape the entire site. We had 20+ individuals attempting to do this; some as often as every 6 hours. That was slowing down the site and eating up all the bandwidth for people that were legitimately trying to browse the site.
Contribs.org now contains over 5GB of data. Even if those 20 individuals only tried once a week to download the entire site that would account for over 500GB/month. Asuming that contribs is hosted on a dedicated T1 (150KB/s) it would take 41 days to achieve that 500GB.
So basically without any measures in place the abusers were taking/fighting for all available bandwitdh they could have all month long. Measures have been put in place to stop that and the very small (0.25%) of requests that get blocked are more then worth the benefit that is gained for the rest of the community.
If you feel otherwise please speak up.
7 Replies
2390 Views