Changes to traffic control

[Charles]

This topic only applies to those on our cloud services.

 

As we prepare to launch improved spam management, we are also making changes to traffic control.

We have many tools in place to stop malicious traffic on our network. These tools stop day to day bad actors and can also handle situations where we get a huge flood of traffic in a denial of service attack.

It is always a balancing act to stop bad traffic while allowing good traffic. There have been some situations where real users were getting blocked because they were getting caught up in a suspicious IP range, for example.

When you were caught in a block, all you got was a permission denied page and that was it. This is what we want for bad bots or attacks, but for real people that is no help. So today we are launching a new system where you will be presented with a captcha (or similar) challenge to bypass a bot-focused block.

This will allow you, and your visitors, to continue browsing your community if you are caught in a block you should not be in. It also lets our firewall and other systems learn and do a better job of blocking bad traffic while allowing people in.

Please let us know if you experience any issues, inability to access a community, or you are prompted more than once for the challenge to access.

In normal operations, you should really never get the challenge prompt so please also let us know if you see it more frequently.

[Markus Jung]

I installed the tool chatbox+ and now I am prompted repeatedly to solve a quiz, and probably also my users.

Good thing: The quiz is shown in my local language (German).

Will the system learn this and not ask us again after some time? I am on Cloud.

[David N.]

On 8/7/2023 at 8:38 PM, Charles said:

Please let us know if you experience any issues, inability to access a community, or you are prompted more than once for the challenge to access.

I just saw the following after I clicked on member's avatar to see his profile. Is this part of the new spam prevention system? 

[Marc Stridgen]

That is correct, yes. If you answer that, you should be back in right away. This is one of those situations where a real user (yourself) has been caught up in the prevention. This was added to ensure you can get back as soon as possible

[David N.]

That's fine, however I was first confused when I saw that and thought I was victim of a hack or a phishing scam (the black line at the bottom looks like a text field). The problem is that the look of that form is completely unfamiliar, and it looks like one of those fake ads that have fake buttons like "Submit" or "Verify" etc to make you click them by mistake. 

I feel like that the look of that form should match the branding of my site: keep the site header, use the same font I'm using on the rest of the site, same button as in the forum etc...  just like the Invision Community Alert pop-ups. 

[Randy Calvert]

Remember this is happening outside of the IPB software itself. That check is being done by the WAF. It’s not aware of your theme settings etc. it’s not “themeable”. 

[David N.]

On 9/8/2023 at 5:51 PM, Randy Calvert said:

Remember this is happening outside of the IPB software itself. That check is being done by the WAF. It’s not aware of your theme settings etc. it’s not “themeable”. 

Ok I understand. However in my opinion that's an issue for visitors who are seeing this and wondering where it's coming from and whether or not it's legit. 

[Marc Stridgen]

3 hours ago, David N. said:

Ok I understand. However in my opinion that's an issue for visitors who are seeing this and wondering where it's coming from and whether or not it's legit. 

The alternative unfortunately would be not protecting the network in the case of attacks. Its somewhat of a balancing act these days. It should be rare that you see these