User talk:David Gerard

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Can't create user page (edit filter tripped)

Hi; I recognized your username from Wikipedia. I just created an account here, and tried to create a user page with a navbox and some userboxes. However, I tripped a Blackhat SEO Spammer edit filter and have no idea why. Thanks for any help and all the best, Miniapolis (talk) 01:53, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Please see my response here. —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 01:59, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Is it true?

Do my eyes deceive me? Have you returned? CorruptUser 13:55, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I stop by, y'know! - David Gerard (talk) 16:02, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Have a beer, or not if you are a quitter sober. CorruptUser 16:10, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Just sent you an email

I'm extra extra busy right now, but if it's urgent I'll see what I can do. I tried to informe the other members too. GeeJayK (talk) 17:55, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Your book got cited

At around 50:24. Thought you might find it interesting. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 00:32, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

That video is awesome and I heartily endorse it - David Gerard (talk) 16:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Categories

Whenever I add a new category to an article the article itself doesn't show up in the category. I've noticed the same for new pages; they aren't shoeing up at all on Categories. I brought this problem to Bongolian and he told me that the software for it was broken and you might know what would need to be done to fix it. What can we do? BJA2112 (talk) 20:59, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

sounds bizarre. Do you have example edits where this didn't work? Or did it work after a delay? - David Gerard (talk) 21:03, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

I created Category:Historical_countries about a day ago and added a few articles to it (See Belgian Congo, East Germany, Rhodesia, and others. It still shows no articles. Perhaps the cache is stuck?

Also, no one's been able to upload a file for a couple of weeks now. Typical error message is:

Could not store file "/tmp/php3tn89l" at "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/c/cc/Img-9944.jpg".

Maybe some temp space is full on the server and it needs a good restart. —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 22:23, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

ah yeah that'd do it. looking - David Gerard (talk) 00:11, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

images disk is in fact full. not sure why that fucks categories tho - David Gerard (talk) 00:12, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Another example is Category:Theocracy, which initially did not not fill at all, then filled with only 3 of several pages (e.g., Theocracy itself does not appear). Bongolian (talk) 00:22, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

right, i deleted some deleted images and some thumbnails. There's 400 MB of space left. I could upload an image. But that's temporary, cos basically the disk is full. Not thinking about it tonight, will tomorrow. No idea on categories - David Gerard (talk) 00:26, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

This is just an idea, but the wiki software has a job queue, are jobs to update things running properly or is something stuck? There's maintenance scripts that could list the state of things and run or put back abandoned things. This may or may not be useful depending on how things are configured. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 01:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, David, for helping us out. —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 02:15, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, David. Yes, there seems to be a queueing problem. The other problems that I have noticed are 1) Changes to watched pages no longer result in email notifications to people watching them. 2) The search engine is not updated, so new pages no longer autofill in the search box but typing the whole page name in the box does get one to the relevant page (e.g., typing "Wandj" in the box shows nothing, but "Wandjina" goes to the page in question). Bongolian (talk) 03:46, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

running runJobs.php by hand right now, and it's ... doing a lotta stuff - David Gerard (talk) 13:03, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

still running jfc - David Gerard (talk) 13:40, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Looks like it's fixing email notifications, search box problem, and categories problem. Bongolian (talk) 14:44, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

so basically it's cleared the massive backlog, and is now doing stuff in real time. (I've still got it running from a command line.) How are things looking? - David Gerard (talk) 22:34, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Revote

Hi David, are you prepared for the revote starting on the 12th? Bongolian (talk) 18:35, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

yeeeeep. i'll also test the voting thing and check it actually still works. If it doesn't work, I'll alert the Saloon Bar - David Gerard (talk) 21:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

THE VOTING SYSTEM WORKS. Just as long as the folder exists. Thank fuck - David Gerard (talk) 00:43, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, David! Bongolian (talk) 01:18, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Shouldn't the vote be closing some time soon? Christopher (talk) 12:33, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

oooops! Now closed. Sending results to Cosmikdebris shortly - David Gerard (talk) 12:55, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello David

We’ve always had a combative relationship. I may have even lashed out from time to time… as is my nature. That said, I have enjoyed your contributions to the crypto/NFT disaster. Kudos, dearest of friends. Signed - a horny fan… Aceⁱ⁹ 06:38, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

well that's the trouble with us both being arseholes. Thank you! - David Gerard (talk) 08:17, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

NFTs etc are mix of ponzi and pyramid scheming. It’s pretty interesting. And yes - we both are bastards. Aceⁱ⁹ 22:12, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Notifications not working

Bongolian brought up email notifications not working on Technical support. I suggested it would be good for you to have a look, and pinged, but now I've tested pinging myself from another account and that doesn't seem to work, so I'm leaving this message so you see it. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 11:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

just seen - David Gerard (talk) 12:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

DDoS attack

We've been under what appears to be a 2+ week DDoS attack (RationalWiki:Technical support#Is it just me or is the searching function getting slower?. Is there any chance you could help with that? Bongolian (talk) 19:07, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

looks at a glance like the same old problem, i.e. hitting diffs super hard which is computationally expensive. There's a rate limiter, but it only applies to editing and not reading (or I could set not-logged-in reads to one per second). Still looking for something to do with this ... - David Gerard (talk) 19:49, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

More like, 2+ months (RationalWiki:Technical support#Why was site down?) 2600:387:15:2810:0:0:0:1 (talk) 20:03, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

mod_evasive looks perfect for the job, except it doesn't work with X-Forwarded-For. So it blocks the load balancer IP! brilliant - David Gerard (talk) 20:19, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Someone suggested wikidiff2 earlier, what about that? 2600:387:15:2810:0:0:0:1 (talk) 20:22, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

could do, but the problem is the DDOS - David Gerard (talk) 20:42, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

varnish vsthrottle looks perfect, but it's only in the enterprise edition lol - David Gerard (talk) 20:42, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

ok, trying nginx ratelimiting now. if you do a shitload of centre-clicks to open 100 tabs at a time, you may have issues - David Gerard (talk) 20:50, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

aaand it appears not to be doing fuck all ... seeing why - David Gerard (talk) 20:51, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

ok, i went for the unscaleable solution, which is blocking all of Alicloud, which is where the DDOS is coming from. Let's see if anything's happier and how long it takes them to notice - David Gerard (talk) 20:58, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

took out that, instead I've set nginx to only allow 2 reqs/sec from any given IP. Above that you get a 503 error. So if your style is 100 tab bursts, you will be annoyed. However, our load average is now at 4 to 5, which is fine - David Gerard (talk) 21:05, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

What the hell is Alicloud? Some sort of rebranded Stormfront? --Luigifan18 (talk) 21:06, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

lol, Chinese cloud provider, like a local version of AWS except confusing - David Gerard (talk) 21:06, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Shorthand for Alibaba Cloud I presume. Unfortunately cloud-based DDoS has been a thing for a while, even Microsoft cloud and AWS etc. has been used for DDoS. I think they are reasonably reputable though, as in they will respond to abuse reports. BobJohnson (talk) 22:28, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Ig diffs and cache issues still persist for now. 2600:387:15:2810:0:0:0:1 (talk) 21:10, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

it's slow, but it's faster than it was ... at least it's usable now. Will tweak further. Let's take this discussion to RationalWiki:Saloon_bar#DDOS_rate_limiting_in_place_-_2_reqs_per_second_per_IP_address - David Gerard (talk) 21:20, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

It seems that pages that have multiple images do not load all the images without a page refresh. This seems to have corresponded temporally with your fix. Perhaps the fix could be tweaked? Bongolian (talk) 17:55, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

So that explains the blue question mark thingys. 2600:387:F:5916:0:0:0:8 (talk) 20:10, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Board meeting

The upcoming board meeting August 18th 1700 UTC is in large part about a new matter that concerns you personally, so in case you've missed that, you may may want to attend. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 18:55, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Let's assume I'm not a fan of mystery meat, so if someone could drop me a line - David Gerard (talk) 18:59, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Check your email. —cosmikdebris ^talk stalk 19:14, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Google search results and AI scraping

Just a thought as I don't know the details for RW. Google has changed in such a way that blocking its search AI overview scraping removes websites from search indexing too. On the Saloon Bar at present, people note that pages have gone from Google search results. I don't know whether your blocking of DDoSers (a good thing obviously) may have trampled on Google's bot in such a way that it does that in response. If so, unblocking that one in particular could be needed to appear in Google results once more. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 10:17, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

yeah, that's a consideration - I've been blocking the bots that are actually being pathological, and Googlebot is reasonably well behaved. So far - David Gerard (talk) 10:54, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Using the Google Search Console?

Asking you here since you read this but you're not usually on Discord. I want to ask further about this Google de-indexing issue now discussed here. It's the big new thing we worry about. Do you know if anyone (yourself, Trent, etc.) has Google Search Console stuff set up so it can be used? Otherwise, about doing so, seems to require verification via adding a string to the rationalwiki.org DNS record, which requires signing in to the domain name provider. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 21:01, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

I think I can add that if needed, whoever's doing that should email me with details of what to add - David Gerard (talk) 21:50, 21 September 2024 (UTC)