Server changes over the weekend
 

Over the weekend I took some steps to improve the speed and security of the site. Most importantly the entire site has been placed behind a CDN (content delivery network). What this means is that we now have a third party service which is storing copies of our data on their servers around the world. Now, whenever you visit imfdb, you are pulling data from the server that is closest to you! This takes a tremendous load off of our server. Page load times have been SIGNIFICANTLY improved - we've gone from an average load time of 30 seconds to 3 seconds, and less than a second on small pages.

Additionally, because this CDN is made up of thousands of websites, anytime a spammer is caught spamming on any site in the network they are blocked on all sites in the network. We should see a serious reduction in spamming on both the wiki and the forums.

Unintended consequences.

Ben41 has reported a couple issues.

1. Screenshots that are overwritten are not changing immediately. This is because while your edit has gone through, the server you happen to be pulling the image from has not been updated yet.

2. You are challenged with a captcha when uploading screenshots. This is part of the new security measures to stop spammers from uploading garbage.

Both of these settings can be adjusted on my end. I can force the cache to update faster and I can lower the security settings so hopefully it won't be triggered when uploading screenshots.

Can you guys let me know if you're running into any other annoying issues and we can tweak the settings.

Ah, I wondered what that Cloudflare screen that popped up once when a page didn't load was all about.

#1 would explain my recent issues. I really need to come here more often.

I have noticed the faster load times, but not the other issues...yet. Still, I guess server upgrades are welcome.

It normally takes about a minute for The Unit page to fully load for me. I checked earlier and that time was at least cut in half.

I find it very irritating to be challenged by a CAPTCHA every time I try to load an image. It seems a bit ridiculous to challenge me EVERY TIME in the same session when I'm uploading new gun photos. Is there something we can do about that? I was gonna upload a bunch of new GUN pics but I'll wait until that can be resolved.

And since this 'upgrade' MY ENTIRE imfdb experience is much SLOWER than before. And I mean EVERYTHING. Viewing and loading pages. Even seeing myself on a forum post. everything loads like molasses (at least for me). It may be great for everyone else, but at this time, for me, the slow load times are stopping me from doing more contributions because I try to upload on the fly between jobs. Don't know why. It SHOULD be faster.

Hm, I get that from time to time, but not on every image. From the message that pops up, it seems the software has some sort of blacklist of computers or activities which it throws up a CAPTCHA for, perhaps you're giving it a false positive somehow. Still, I imagine it's on their end rather than yours.

I've set it so that it will remember that you've entered a CAPTCHA correctly for a month. I can also whitelist any IP address you'd like so that you won't receive any security challenges.

The other issue we're having (which is a good one) is a sudden bump in traffic. Google seems to like the new setup and we saw a 15% bump in search traffic overnight a couple weeks ago - this is taxing the existing hardware. I'm looking into taking the entire site to a cloud based hosting system that can dynamically assign more resources as necessary.

Okay this sucks..... I'm logged into IMFDB, but when I go to an image or a movie page, the system logs me out (or at least it THINKS it does). I see that I'm not logged in anymore, so I can't EDIT anything. But when I try to re-log in I get the WARNING message that I'm already logged in so my log in activity has been blocked. WTF???!?!?!

I can't count the number of times I can't edit something because the system logs me out ... but it tells me I'm NOT logged out, but all I see is my IP address and the log in prompt in the upper right corner and I don't have the power to change anything .......

A new bug in the system?

I think you might be having a version of this issue where Cloudflare returns a snapshot of the page as it appeared to someone else, rather than the page as it is now. You're not logged out, it's just showing you how the page looked to someone who was logged out.

You could probably get around the missing edit prompt by changing the page URL from to Not ideal, but it's a workaround. It should work the same with any other action; you'll need to find a page where you can perform the action, then use that URL as a template.