Warning guys, we had some drop kik DoS our Forum tonight via the timeslip.php file. they just set something to continuously request http://site.org/forum/timeslip.php? and this caused the load to skyrocket and DoS'd us. Any ideas how forum permissions can be applied to this file??

Couldnt that be done by requesting ANY php file that contained a couple queries ?
If yes then how do you prevent it ?

Doug

Correct, although not quite as bad, the timeslip db makes alot of DB queries..

Is there any way to limit the number of queries any 1 client can make per second?

A typical (unmodified) timeslips page makes 7 queries. The page you're viewing right now makes 19.

It's odd because it was just that page that caused the problem .. maybe it's doing a more complex query ?? I don't know .. but didn't happen with the other pages only the timeslip page was targetted .. wierd.

The problem is that the custom fields are not indexed and the userfield table is walked 6 times right off the bat doing compares of the field setting.

On a large forum, this == bad.

Adding an index to the custom fields 51 through 56 could show you an improvement.

How might I index said fields ? :) I am not sure how to do this as I've never done nor had to do this before.

i haven't been following this thread in a while. i take it there won't be a version for 3.5.x?

it's a really popular feature on my board and the members are clamoring for it, along with the trader ratings hack. :(

It would be nice if someone could port it to 3.5 as a product. That somebody would be me if I had the smarts but unfortunatley I'm just a hack ;)

I saw someone using vb. 3.5.1 with this hack on their site. I was looking to see if a new upgarde was made and come to see it was this version on their 3.5.1