Trollproblem

Trollproblem

Postby bzt » 08 Jul 2022, 04:17

Dear @Julius,

It looks like this forum has a serious trollproblem. There's a certain someone (name starting with the letter "H" and his alterego account starting with an "L"), who is flooding these forums with garbage, usually 5 - 10 posts at once per day. What's common in these posts, that they carry zero information, usually are off-topic, and many of them is just about trying to be personal and insulting and nothing else. I don't know if its related, but server issues are happening again since this particular someone started to flood the forum. There were 2 outages already in the last 7 days.

Is there anything you could do about it? (I know ban doesn't work, they can just re-register under another alterego, but could you please try to talk to them or reject their IP from firewall or something?)

Thank you.
bzt

ps: I feel sad and ashamed of being a human when I see there are people like these trolls... :-(
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 08 Jul 2022, 09:32

To be honest I don't really check the Super tux and STK forums unless someone specifically reports posts through the reporting system. Their own moderation team is not active?
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby bzt » 08 Jul 2022, 10:19

Looks like it.

TBH I only see them when I check the new posts on the "View active topics" link. They do not bother me at all, however the forum outages do, and if they are related somehow (DDoS?) then I think something should be done. Frankly I don't know what you could do, it's just I thought you should know. At least the timings are more than suspicious, and it happened multiple times already.

(There was a dns failure which could be caused by overloading the bind daemon; and another one which looked like the webserver was out of free concurrent connections, that's why I'm suspecting there's a DDoS in the background. I could be wrong about this of course, I would have to see the logs to be sure.)

Cheers,
bzt
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby PeterX » 08 Jul 2022, 10:56

I don't see trollish behaviour of Hallowedtux. She only posts a lot but it's not trollish imho. I mean there are relevant infos in the postings. Sometimes she reacts when someone else swears. But I'm not sure, I mean she IS posting a lot.

And I don't think Lakshnewaccount is the same person as Hallowedtux.

Greetings
Peter
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 08 Jul 2022, 14:07

The forum outage with SQL error is unrelated and an longstanding issue that I think is related to some upgrade problem with the container host.
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby bzt » 08 Jul 2022, 18:52

PeterX {l Wrote}:I mean there are relevant infos in the postings.
I dunno. I've now checked the last 2 weeks posts (there were quite a lot), and couldn't find any. And you must admit that the similarity in their behaviour (how they react and what they react to) is uncanny at least.

Julius {l Wrote}:The forum outage with SQL error is unrelated and an longstanding issue that I think is related to some upgrade problem with the container host.
Nope, the error message was clear. There was a name resolution issue so phpbb couldn't find the sql server. You can solve this once and for all by using the sql server's IP address instead of a hostname in the phpbb's config.

But I'm not talking about that only. There were a webserver outage too yesterday, with a typical symptom of a DDoS attack, connection error on port 443.

Cheers,
bzt
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby PeterX » 08 Jul 2022, 19:36

bzt {l Wrote}:
PeterX {l Wrote}:I mean there are relevant infos in the postings.
I dunno. I've now checked the last 2 weeks posts (there were quite a lot), and couldn't find any. And you must admit that the similarity in their behaviour (how they react and what they react to) is uncanny at least.

Yup, they are a bit childish (several people in the Supertux forum), but that's what I expect when they are players of a game popular among children. I would recommend HallowedTux to take a step back and post less often, but that's only a recommendation.

Edit: They are posting similar stuff and style, but I still think they are several persons. But I don't know sure.

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Peter
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 08 Jul 2022, 21:20

bzt {l Wrote}:Nope, the error message was clear. There was a name resolution issue so phpbb couldn't find the sql server. You can solve this once and for all by using the sql server's IP address instead of a hostname in the phpbb's config.

But I'm not talking about that only. There were a webserver outage too yesterday, with a typical symptom of a DDoS attack, connection error on port 443.

Cheers,
bzt


I have not noticed any other issues, but when hosting the SQL database via Docker, which AFAIK is the case for this forum (I am not the admin) then the Docker network internal IP address can easily change when recreating the container. And the connection error on port 443 is also a typical reverse proxy issue when the containers fail to restart.
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby bzt » 11 Jul 2022, 16:00

Auch. Yet another reason why not to use Docker... So these problem won't go away any time soon? :-( Let's just hope then the Docker instance won't have to restart for while.

Cheers,
bzt
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 14 Jul 2022, 16:40

So I had some time to look at the forums, and there are indeed some users that are pushing each others buttons and starting a lot of non-sense discussions.

However it seems like banning them has been tried before and they just came back under a new account (which I guess was also my fault as I approved those new accounts as I assumed they just forgot their password or so).

However it points to a general problem that the ST moderators seem to be inactive? If that is the case I am seriously considering to close the ST forums all together as our old forums are in bad shape anyways and I really don't want waste a lot of time moderating forums that the original developers seem to have abandoned.

But maybe there are some ST community members that are willing to step up as moderators?
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 18 Jul 2022, 20:19

We found two new volunteer moderators for SuperTux :)
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Re: Trollproblem

Postby Julius » 19 Sep 2022, 18:26

We had to ban a bunch of users active in the SuperTux forum...

I hope we can offer a new forum with better moderation tools to the hosted projects here soon. I made some progress on the Discourse multi-site feature for that over the weekend.
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