60 seconds between posts?

[marcusquinn]

Kinda slows me down

[girish]

Sorry had to do it keep spam down. That delay really dramatically reduces moderation of junk.

[marcusquinn]

@girish fair enough! Sorry, I do post a lot of junk

[girish]

@marcusquinn ha ha. Thing is we have like 1.2m monthly hits on this forum! A good 20-30% of those are bots. Crazy.

[robi]

@girish why? to what resources? what's drawing traffic?

[girish]

@robi Not sure, NodeBB doesn't give much information other than a pretty graph with hit count.

[robi]

@girish how about adding some Matomo tracking?
Or access log analysis? The former would be easier.

[rmdes]

@girish I'm not sure why but on my previous job cloudron, both NodeBB and Discourse forums where attracting a similar amount of junk traffic, in fact our forums where making more "visitors" than our wordpress main website, it was kind of odd and I never took the time to verify where this traffic was coming and going to..

it seems to me that both forum engine, create content in a way that attract a lot of different search/bot engines ?

[robi]

@rmdes @girish I also suspect that the stats tracking is double or triple counting things, as on brand new installs there's an inordinate amount of traffic just from setting things up.

Someone please set up Matomo or any other stats to validate.

[humptydumpty]

I don't know about NodeBB or Discourse but Wordpress is a spam magnet. The first thing I do for fresh WP installs is set up Wordfence and 2FA TOTP and within the first 48 hours, I would have hundreds of bot login attempts that get blocked.

[robi]

@humptydumpty is there some sort of API that a new WP install pings which everyone can see and then monitor?

I have seen this too with WP Cerber which effectively blocks so many login attempts and other malware. 500+ attempts per week for a new domain just set up. Crazy.

[marcusquinn]

Added a proposal for including Bad Bots Blackhole with all WP installs. We have good experience of it for over a year now.

• https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3770/blackhole-for-bad-bots-proposing-this-as-a-default-install

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn I installed it today but it doesn't seem to be working. I use WP-Rocket and after some research, it turns out it's not compatible with it. BBB needs WP init and WP-Rocket doesn't have that option. I would need to disable page caching and then it would work but that's a horrible trade off.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Not sure, we tried all the caching plugins a few years ago and settled on WP Super Cache, as both the one that Automattic uses on Wordpress.com, good code quality and the only one that supports our fragment caching needs.

As an example swanson.co.uk has something like over a dozen country aliases, languages, about 200 plugins and status.swanson.co.uk shows the performance. (although sometimes their more distant servers timeout)

[humptydumpty]

@marcusquinn WP-Rocket is the only plugin that works out of the box for my all WP sites without breaking anything. I've tried all the known caching plugins and I've hit a wall of some kind on each site. There's a lot of things at play like the themes and plugins I'm using, also the server setup (this was back on my previous server with DO+ServerPilot. If the site didn't break, the issue would be with speed/performance. I finally gave up and got WP-Rocket and it might not be the ideal plugin but it's not breaking my sites and I'm saving server resources. For me, that's a win until I gather enough stamina to go on another diagnostic run.

[marcusquinn]

@humptydumpty Sure, I didn't dislike Rocket when we tried it but fragment caching was important to us as many users are logged in and no other plugins allow for caching when logged-in without issues.

[jdaviescoates]

It's a shame NodeBB doesn't have the reputation levels thing like Discourse which gives nice fine grained permissions so that trusted members needn't be slowed down (on Discourse new members just can't post links at all which cuts down on spam loads).

[girish]

@marcusquinn @jdaviescoates I went back and re-check what I had configured. I think I made the delay between posts as 60 seconds for non-new users as well. That was indeed a mistake. It is now like this. So new users, can only make a second post after 360 seconds (this is OK , they only need a reputation of 1 vote to get over it).

[marcusquinn]

@girish Cool

[marcusquinn]

@marcusquinn 20 secs works