RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Erato on Sunday 21 December 25 23:36 GMT (UK)
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Yes, dammit, I am. I've been on RootsChat for twenty years. Why has it suddenly started to repeatedly question my humanity?
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My guess is that the cloudflare check for humanity is an attempt to solve a problem that caused the overload on the website for the past few days. There may have been too many bots hitting the site and slowing things down. It’s only a guess. Maybe one of the moderators will come along and tell us why.
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Yes, if the website is receiving an incresed amount of traffic, or bots or unusual activity, then it may do the extra checks.
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Same thing happening here.
Well at least they don't add one of those silly photos divided into squares and tell you to click on all the squares with traffic lights in them ::)
Bev
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I went into the chatroom yesterday where I was greeted with "I haven't seen you for quite a while".
The answer was because I couldn't get onto the site, which I assume was because either my broadband line suppier or rootschat itself had too much traffic.
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So much for artificial "intelligence." This blasted thing has checked me hundreds of times and concluded that I am human every single time, but it doesn't learn from that experience. Am I being singled out because I have a suspicious IP address in Ecuador?
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If the checks have only recently started happening, maybe do an antivirus check on your computer.
A couple of years back, I started having issues getting into my Gmail, with Google performing multiple checks. Turns out I had a low-risk Adware Trojan on my computer. Once it was removed, Gmail was fine.
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So much for artificial "intelligence." This blasted thing has checked me hundreds of times and concluded that I am human every single time, but it doesn't learn from that experience. Am I being singled out because I have a suspicious IP address in Ecuador?
Good question, but I doubt it. On the desktop it asks me every time. On the Ipad, every time but sometimes I don't have to check the box.
And good point, you would think it would learn to trust your IP address. On the other hand, IP addresses can probably be spoofed, like everything else.
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Googling "can you spoof an IP address" got me a lot of results, but this seems to be the best explanation:
If your objective is to DoS (flood the target with an overwhelming volume of traffic) then such a manipulation is useful, but if you intend to have some legitimate traffic between target and altered IP it won't work.
The last point was explained earlier in that thread. The reason why it won't work if you want legitimate traffic, namely to receive information back from the site, is because the site would send all information to the spoofed address, since that is where you told it you were.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/212705/is-it-possible-to-spoof-an-ip-address-to-an-exact-number
So now we both know, I think. Maybe someone who knows more about it will come along and verify that information.
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And ... googling "does Cloudflare protect against DDOS" [deliberate denial of service] gets:
"Cloudflare offers free DDoS protection for websites and applications with all application services plans. Sign up now to protect against DDoS attacks." from the Google summary hit page. The link goes to
https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/ddos-for-web/
which says "Free DDoS for websites and so much more"
and thanks for asking. I learned from that site that I can get a free version of Cloudflare for my "hobby project" family history site, which I will look into as soon as I sort out one ggg grandfather's will and property and find another gg grandfather's parents, etc., etc.
Final (maybe) summary: So rootschat might have been experiencing a DDOS attack last weekend. The attacker's software would be spoofing very many IP addresses, possibly including those from legitimate users. So there would be no point in Cloudflare learning to trust your IP since it could be spoofed during the next attack anyway.
Assuming I understand this whole business correctly.
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The three forums I tend to use most all showed a spike in guest numbers in late November, at times the ratio of guests to registered users could be 2000/1 but guests to active users often exceeds 10,000/1.