What's with this new thing at HW?

You can't press the submit button more often than once every 90 seconds (1.5 minutes). I've seen these done on other sites. The idea is to slow down bot (automated) spam attacks against a web site.

Sadly the big side effect is that guys like you and I would can type and post very fast get throttled down. For a lot of posts, I can in 90 seconds respond to maybe 3 or things. Now when I log in I just pick one or two.

Don't what kind of attacks this site is getting but the only reason the limit is there to limit the evil bot army. You and I are collateral damage in that battle.

Andrew

That's exactly right. We were deluged with hundreds of spam, probably generated by bots, so there is a 90 second time delay between posts - although I thought it was only at night but I might be wrong. I've been caught in that a lot because I also type fast.

Not sure this is even relevant (well, maybe it is), but here's another way to add a long post to an existing thread, or type the first (long) entry of a new thread. I bet some of you also do it the way I will now describe, having already thought of it yourselves.

I had come to realize that when making long posts here that I had been taking a while to do so, with all the re-reading, editing, rephrasing and such that I was doing before sending to the forum. Just my style of writing. I don't believe I was "tieing up" any forum time by doing this when using the forum input boxes, but I did feel a little time constraint when doing this in real time on the forum.

So I decided to streamline things when preparing a rather long post (this doesn't apply so much for shorter posts) as follows:

1. Minimize the screen which was now on HW PC Forum
2. open Word or similar word processor
3. Type up my long post-to-be at my leisure, with no time pressure
4. When it's done, highlight it
5. Do CTRL-C to copy it
6. Maximize screen, recalling HW PC Forum
7. Go to the input box for the thread where I wish to make my post
8. Do CTRL-V to copy my entire post-to-be into the input box
9. Send this post-to-be to the thread

This way, the amount of time that I have to spend posting online in any thread, or starting one, is minimal, as all I have to do is a CTRL-V paste and then send to the forum what I just pasted.

Again, not sure if this impacts the now built in delays discussed above to foil the bots, but maybe some of you more computer knowledgable than I am can address this point.

One of the problems with the bots is that they and they're operators learn how to defeat them - fast. My personal blog has about 600 "ham" comments (real people) and about 10,000 spam comments that get filtered out by the software. Even with all the filtering and protections I put it, I still have to delete comments every day.

On a site like, it's much worse. The time limit, while annoying does one thing the bots don't like - makes 'em slow down and gives them false indications that the site is broken. The bot nets thrive on being able to launch hundreds of thousands links per minute across the network. When they run into one very slow site, they tend to move on to other sites that move faster and have few protections in place.

Still, I think 90 seconds might be too long, 30 or 60 might still do the job.

And yes, David, it's made me change my posting behavior.

tud,

now that I know what's going on, I am certainly for the good of HW. it's always been peter's show, and I have always supported whatever he wants to do with his site. your explanation fills in the gaps and holes. was this new policy announced to all in advance, or was it mostly by surprise, like to me and some other regular posters? curious. either way, whatever works best.

for those that type super slow, or type one finger at the time, they would probably never notice the change.

moderators: why not just impose a captcha on unusually active accounts?

I am a reader, not a writer.. oops... you caught me in the act!! ha ha (Thursday humor to you bloggers!!)

It also will do this if you posts certain words..
So, some words are considered spam now.

Wow, I thought this was a joke when I first read it...too many posts per minute (or, now, minute and a half)! I don't read, digest, give thought, then type a reply that quickly. Wow

Hey, purgatory, glad you posted was getting worried about you...
Many prayers

David, good to see you're still posting here! I type much too slow to be affected by this. Best wishes to all!