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About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration

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Offline acseven

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About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« on: 03 / May / 2016, 21:50:31 »
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Hi,


Sorry about taking this long to look at these last messages about some significant issues of the forum, I wasn't (and still am not) with a lot of free time these days to do something about it. But anyway, thanks to all that reported these in. 
Just so you know, I'm locking all the other threads about this hence concentrating comments in one single thread


I guess it sums up to:
  • Search indexing by crawlers not working
  • Search broken if not logged in
  • Facebook registration process for new users broken (triggers an unnecessary e-mail verification)
Comment/status:
  • I wasn't aware of this one, and it's a pretty bad one. I haven't looked into it thoroughly but I think it's related both to some odd robots limitation and the recaptcha plugin. It will be fixed soon.
  • Working as intended. This forum is hosted on a shared server, and given the history older users may recall with spam attacks and performance in general, which ultimately made my old hosts disable my account and forcing me to move to another one. The current server has been a far better solution and even though its not ideal, there were several implementations made to reduce server load. Making the forum too open to queries was a severe issue when handling spammer attacks. That said, I've disabled the recaptcha feature, replacing it with an underlying feature which hopefully may work well enough to maintain the site relatively secure.
  • Facebook registration is effectively broken and I don't have a solution yet. The alternative for the meantime is to register using e-mail+password. Edit: I haven't tested this, but after registering with a common e-mail+password with should be able to associate your account to Facebook (Menu item in your profile) and hence on being able to login via facebook.
Other tweaks specifically on the site design are thought out but again my limited time hasn't allowed me to have a look into it.


Cheers,
acseven


Original posts:
« Last Edit: 04 / May / 2016, 00:10:31 by acseven »
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Offline reyalp

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + other issues
« Reply #1 on: 03 / May / 2016, 22:51:59 »
Quote from: acseven on 03 / May / 2016, 21:50:31
Working as intended. This forum is hosted on a shared server, and given the history older users may recall with spam attacks and performance in general, which ultimately made my old hosts disable my account and forcing me to move to another one. The current server has been a far better solution and even though its not ideal, there were several implementations made to reduce server load. Making the forum too open to queries was a severe issue when handling spammer attacks. That said, I've disabled the recaptcha feature, replacing it with an underlying feature which hopefully may work well enough to maintain the site relatively secure.
Assuming this is about the search not working for non-registered users, I don't understand how this could be "as intended"

The problem isn't that non-logged in users had to solve a captcha, it's that even if you did, there was no way to actually see any results. You would just be shown the captcha over and over.

I don't see any problem with showing the recaptcha to non logged in users who want to search. The majority of human users are likely to get "I'm not a robot" checkbox or a relatively simple image challenge.

At the moment, search appears to be completely open, which nice for users but might cause load problems if there's nothing to limit the robots.
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Offline acseven

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + other issues
« Reply #2 on: 04 / May / 2016, 00:07:55 »
Quote from: reyalp on 03 / May / 2016, 22:51:59
Assuming this is about the search not working for non-registered users, I don't understand how this could be "as intended"


The thing is - as I understood it then - I needed to deter server load at whatever expense. The forum has far greater guest traffic than logged in (either bots or real visitors), so it was it seemed logical to reduce the load there, which it did. The big difference now is that my current host has proved to be dramatically better than the previous ones, but I didn't want to risk having my account blocked again. They are continuously upgrading the servers to improve performance, which has contributed a great deal for general stability. More importantly, this is not the only site I'm running, and also not the the most critical - hence my previous reasoning.


As for the current state - search is available without captcha - I'm leaving it as a test. Let's see how it goes.

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Offline reyalp

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + other issues
« Reply #3 on: 04 / May / 2016, 00:24:28 »
Quote from: acseven on 04 / May / 2016, 00:07:55
The thing is - as I understood it then - I needed to deter server load at whatever expense.
I get that. I only wanted to make sure it was clear that the search captcha implementation was broken. Filling out the captcha correctly did not allow you to actually search.

A non-broken captcha implementation should stop most of the bot traffic, while allowing most human users to search with minimal frustration.
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Offline acseven

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« Reply #4 on: 04 / May / 2016, 00:30:38 »
It was broken, yeah! Let me see the stats in a few days time and after that I'll see what to do.
« Last Edit: 09 / May / 2016, 15:28:03 by acseven »
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Offline acseven

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« Reply #5 on: 04 / May / 2016, 00:31:30 »
And damn Tapatalk is giving me those pesky errors again when trying to browse sub forums. :/
« Last Edit: 09 / May / 2016, 15:27:54 by acseven »
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Offline acseven

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« Reply #6 on: 18 / May / 2016, 17:42:58 »
Hi guys,


Sorry about the delay. An update on the indexing issues: there were different issues going on contributing to what appeared on Google searches. Right now it's better - recent posts should be appearing but due to another issue I found with the related topics module, there are recent posts that Google has indexed with very old reference dates, hence demoting the results. I've made some changes on that as well, let's see if it gets back to normal.


Cheers 
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Offline waterwingz

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« Reply #7 on: 18 / May / 2016, 19:06:40 »
Quote from: acseven on 18 / May / 2016, 17:42:58
Sorry about the delay. An update on the indexing issues: there were different issues going on contributing to what appeared on Google searches. Right now it's better - recent posts should be appearing but due to another issue I found with the related topics module, there are recent posts that Google has indexed with very old reference dates, hence demoting the results. I've made some changes on that as well, let's see if it gets back to normal.
Good news! Any update on the broken tapatalk issues?
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Offline acseven

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Re: About Search within and outside the Forum + Facebook registration
« Reply #8 on: 19 / May / 2016, 07:19:54 »
Quote from: waterwingz on 18 / May / 2016, 19:06:40
Good news! Any update on the broken tapatalk issues?


Nope, not yet, sorry about that!
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