All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part V

[Tennie]

Has anyone tried to ascertain the identities of the group(s) responsible for the DDoS and their reason(s) for doing it?

[GethN7]

Has anyone tried to ascertain the identities of the group(s) responsible for the DDoS and their reason(s) for doing it?

 

Unfortunately, we have no solid leads since all their communications (read: threats) have been through known proxies used by Tor nodes, botnets, and deep web IPs, but we do know for sure that whoever is responsible has a grudge against Orain and Dusti, alleging, among other things, that Orain sells private data, a charge I can and would claim before any court of law to be completely false, and they threatened to hand over sensitive information relating to Orain's servers to various parties on the clearnet (the ordinary internet) if we didn't knuckle under and leave their harrassment and false charges up.

I cannot reveal what information they intended to divulge, as we are still investigating the severity of the alleged threat and its seriousness, but it is enough of a threat we will be reviewing our security arrangements and likely further upgrading them to prevent further attacks, and even if this is just a bluff by some coward behind 7 proxies, rest assured I and the rest of Orain are taking this deadly seriously and plan to make sure such threats will not compromise the privacy of its users nor the content we host.

[robkelk]

Best not to discuss such things in a public forum, in case subsequent legal action is seen to be compromised.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[GethN7]

Best not to discuss such things in a public forum, in case subsequent legal action is seen to be compromised.

 

That's not even a concern at this point, as we have more than enough evidence of this party's criminal acts, not to mention Orain's current and former staff can all utterly refute these baseless charges with absolute confidence, but the advice is appreciated.

[GethN7]

I cannot reveal what we intend to do specifically, but I have consulted with the rest of Orain Staff about improving our server security so even this threat of DDoSing will not be a concern.

As for the leaking of data, I have been working with various places it was illegally disseminated to and have recieved outstanding support. In fact, I so appreciate GitHub's help I want to buy their staff a round of beers.

The information in question will soon be rendered meaningless anyway (it pertained to our server configuration, no private data on any user was leaked, nor was any database content on any wiki compromised), as our new security arrangements will make this foolish attempt to destabilize Orain irrelevant in the future, and you have my word Orain will not bow to the will of cybercriminals and that we have not, will not, and never will disseminate private information relating to users or our server data as this cyber criminal accused us of (and ironically they are guilty of that very crime), except in accordance with proper demands by law enforcement.

 

[GethN7]

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make:

I now have DigitalOcean and Cloudflare account access, which means I now have Dusti-level powers concerning our server controls and finances as well as our caching service.

However, I refuse to use them foolishly or abuse those powers, as Great Power Comes With Great Responsibility.

In fact, I recently paid for our server bills this month as my first act upon gaining those right since Dusti was unable to access his own funds at this time, and you have my solemn promise these new powers will only be used to ensure the best possible service for ATT and Orain.

[GethN7]

An announcement on some ATT specific business, this regarding a change I'm making to the Crowners.

All of the Sugar Wiki mega pages will be parceled off into subpages for the appropriate works for their appropriate subpages, with only examples lacking proper pages retained, as it's much easier to link people to the category for Awesome/Heartwarming/Funny/etc as opposed to having mega pages, as some work has been posted twice, one to the work crowner subpage, once to the mega page.

All main mega crowner pages will be redirected to their categories to further simplify things.

I know, I ordinarily ask the community about these things, and if you guys think this is stupid, tell me now and I'll stop, but I'm trying to avoid TV Tropes' slipshod organization, boost our page count by putting information where it belongs, and make our categories more useful.

This should not seriously screw over any preexisting work and is largely my own cleanup project, but if it's going to cause an issue I'm not aware of, do let me know.

[Bob Schroeck]

So far seems to be fine, Geth. Nothing I've seen you doing is anything more than I've thought about doing myself at one time or another.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

So far seems to be fine, Geth. Nothing I've seen you doing is anything more than I've thought about doing myself at one time or another.

 

Glad to hear. I foud a lot of troper tales and repeated work while doing this, and if you check Gethbot, it's been busy cleaning up any leftover category breadcrumbs.

Also, I'm pleased to say I noticed our SEO has been steadily increasing, and while were not anywhere near TV Tropes at its peak, were definitely on the map, and word has spread we're the go to if you have no stomach for TVT.

However, I'm not to thank for that. All of you who poured your blood, sweat, and tears into making us viable are, and I can't thank you all enough.

[robkelk]

Quickly popping in to ask: Do we have this one already? http://www.marycagle.com/letsspeakengli ... omance-101
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[GethN7]

Quickly popping in to ask: Do we have this one already? http://www.marycagle.com/letsspeakengli ... omance-101

 

Not to my knowledge.

[GethN7]

I now have my own twitter account!

http://twitter.com/geth_n7

All official ATT business will still go through the site account, this is just my personal one.

[GethN7]

Orain is experiencing recurring database errors due to what appears to be a server config change that went epically wrong, we are attempting to debug and figure out why it keeps occurring, will leave a message to this effect on our twitter.

[GethN7]

Problems should be fixed now.

Update: Goofed, sent a personal tweet via the site Twitter, but since it reflects our site philosophy, I left it up, better explanation here:

http://gethn7.blogspot.com/2015/06/i-go ... plain.html

[GethN7]

FYI, that has to be quick, my internet signal might crap out, but due to inclement weather, I may not be around much for the next few days due to horrible net reception, have asked Brent and the Orain guys to pick up the baton in my place, will update when that clears up.

[Labster]

Apparently I'm doing a bad job, because all of the subpage things are broken from the upgrade, because of this.  http://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbo ... ns.php#L42  Can't really do much but ask Orain staff to look into the problem.
-- ∇×V

[GethN7]

I'm back. Weather cleared up where I am, so my signal no longer sucks.

[GethN7]

I'm delivering a report on our current situation at on Orain.

Yes, we are working on it, and it's a global problem, one with multiple facets. We've already nailed down most of the smaller issues, but one of the biggest issues is centered around the ParserFunctions extension, which, while we could remove it to bring back full functionality of at least viewing ATT, this is a bad idea for several reasons:

* That cures an immediate symptom without curing the disease.

* ATT's templates and site code make extensive use of ParserFunctions, it's literally the backbone of almost all of our site layout. Without it, almost none of our templates will function at all and will leave countless pages in a more or less broken state, which, while readable, will be a massive hassle to edit.

* The problem lies at the server level. We discovered some corrupted settings that were part of the problem, but the problems concerning ParserFunctions are not something as simple as us needing to swap out the 1.24 branch for another, and what remedy we must do is still being determined, but we need to be careful, as a lot of Orain wikis make use of it, and doing the wrong thing will break the entire farm to a greater or lesser degree.

* I was the one to discover ParserFunctions went south on Orain, and it has been confirmed via other tests by Orain Staff, and once we get it functional, we should be able to enable all other extensions we disabled earlier to restore us to full functionality and service.

I will keep you all apprised of further updates as we work on this, my apologies for the issues at hand.

[GethN7]

The site is fine now. I was partially responsible for making this take longer with a poorly considered commit intended to fix things, and I offer no excuse for my failure to address this, the blame falls on me alone, and I admit as much here:

http://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbo ... t-12001468

The other half has been resolved as well, so editing and viewing of ATT should function normally, again, my apologies for the inconvenience.

[Bob Schroeck]

Geth, I'm still having problems with the site, even after purging cookies and whatnot.  A number of features are missing still, like cursor-over reveals of spoilers, the "stock" edit reason dropdowns are missing from the edit page, HotCat is missing (although it was there last weekend in Chrome on my Android tablet), the context suggestions for links, templates and categories in the edit window, and maybe a dozen other features.  The user menu across the top of the wiki pages
looks like this (this is a direct cut'n'paste):

Looney Toons  0 
Talk  Admin links  Preferences   
Watchlist    Contributions 
  Log out

The lt and gt entities are literal, that's what I see on the page. 
Anything that uses Liquid Threads is similarly unavailable.  For instance, when I click on "" in that menu, all I get is a page containing

.  Any references to forum threads appear similarly, and are not live links.  I can directly navigate to forum threads by choosing forums from the leftside menu and drilling down one page at a time, but all the formatting is gone -- I get alternating lists of menu entries and blocks of text.
I can't check if any of these are preferences I need to turn back on, because when I try to go to my preferences I get stuff like

Internal error

[fb6c1bfa] 2015-07-07 23:16:30: Fatal exception of type MWException

Edit:  Oh, another couple things that're broken for
me.  Headers look like this:

Header
Text     [edit]   [ ]
  [ ]

And the work/trope/creator templates all look like

Lua error: callParserFunction: function "SUBPAGES" was not found.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Geth, I'm still having problems with the site, even after purging cookies and whatnot.  A number of features are missing still, like cursor-over reveals of spoilers, the "stock" edit reason dropdowns are missing from the edit page, HotCat is missing (although it was there last weekend in Chrome on my Android tablet), the context suggestions for links, templates and categories in the edit window, and maybe a dozen other features.  The user menu across the top of the wiki pages
looks like this (this is a direct cut'n'paste):

Looney Toons  0 
Talk  Admin links  Preferences   
Watchlist    Contributions 
  Log out

The lt and gt entities are literal, that's what I see on the page. 

Anything that uses Liquid Threads is similarly unavailable.  For instance, when I click on "" in that menu, all I get is a page containing

 

.  Any references to forum threads appear similarly, and are not live links.  I can directly navigate to forum threads by choosing forums from the leftside menu and drilling down one page at a time, but all the formatting is gone -- I get alternating lists of menu entries and blocks of text.

I can't check if any of these are preferences I need to turn back on, because when I try to go to my preferences I get stuff like

Internal error

[fb6c1bfa] 2015-07-07 23:16:30: Fatal exception of type MWException

Edit:  Oh, another couple things that're broken for
me.  Headers look like this:

Header
Text     [edit]   [ ]
  [ ]

And the work/trope/creator templates all look like

Lua error: callParserFunction: function "SUBPAGES" was not found.

 

And I thought I was the only one seeing this.

I checked, everything's re-enabled, so one of the fixes done to revive the wiki must have broke something else on the server, filing a report since I have no idea what broke.

http://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbook/issues/650

[robkelk]

I am not seeing that behaviour on the freebie wiki, so this may be ATT-specific.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[GethN7]

I am not seeing that behaviour on the freebie wiki, so this may be ATT-specific.

 

Just ran a refresh of all maintenance tasks on all MW servers, seems to have made the errors clear up, though some errors may persist, purge your web cache.

Let me know if the issues are still around after a day or so.

[GethN7]

Tech update: We've been having some recurring issue where our localisation cache keeps crapping out, but I've been using my shell access to update it every time I notice a problem, let me know if I fall asleep at the wheel.

Also, made a change to our spam filter: It was too harsh and punishing innocent contributors, so I modified it where it's possible for some spammers to get through, but only the ones who post nonsensical word salad posts (all spammers hope to post actual links, they are denied doing that, so we still block 99.99% of all spam), so for those with admin power, delete them and block the spammers, but clean out the summary column for the deleted page to deny leaving a copy of the spam article in the history.

As for anyone making legit edits, look it over, and if looks good, promote them to autopatrolled/confirmed so they can dodge the captcha and spam filterts.

[robkelk]

I just made a feature request for this extension for the freebie wiki - one of my more eager editors wants the functionality there. Do we also want the extension on ATT?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012