Firefox Stops the Rot!

[Rubber Duck]

It is clear that SSL flagging is now going to be part of Firefox 3's anti-phishing strategy. That should clear the way for the end to this White List nonsense.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...efox-3-and-IE7

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=278112

The biggest impediment to IDN now appears to be the the half hour or more that it now seems to take to post anything on this dysfunctional site. It would be nice for the community as a whole to be given some clues as to whether this forum is going to be reconstructed or just allowed to degenerate.

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

The biggest impediment to IDN now appears to be the the half hour or more that it now seems to take to post anything on this dysfunctional site. It would be nice for the community as a whole to be given some clues as to whether this forum is going to be reconstructed or just allowed to degenerate.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. The database needs to be tuned.

MySQL is not a real database, but it certainly has been proven to handle forums much busier than this one. Postgres would be the optimum choice, if only Vbulletin would support it.

The problems with MySQL are that it doesn't handle concurrent SELECT and UPDATE/INSERT very well and you run into the long-running operation timeouts (you get a deadlock - a read waiting on a write, round-robin). The MySQL table driver MyISAM, which I'm guessing is what is being used here, only supports table-level locking, which means in practice that for any UPDATE or INSERT, there is no concurrency - the entire table needs to be locked for the single operation. If multiple users are trying to post or edit, then the operations go into a queue and can hang the database as we see. The solution would be to use the third-party table driver InnoDB, as it supports row-level locking. However, this also contains transaction support so it will be slower than MyISAM unless carefully tuned.

If Olney or someone else is willing to pay me, with cash or a decent revenue earning japanese domain :- ) , then I will offer my services to tune the DB.

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[websjapan]

if a lot of the load is due to the auctions or for sale why not just add an auction script which will stop the large amount of views/refreshes?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=92857

is one option with vb, but there are loads more from hotscripts etc.

[bwhhisc]

Originally Posted by jacksonm

If Olney or someone else is willing to pay me, with cash or a decent revenue earning japanese domain :- ) , then I will offer my services to tune the DB.

I think everyone agrees the Database needs work. The cost should be Olney's alone, but shared by the members
that benefit from the forum. Maybe this can be accomplished by asking regulars to step up and pay for premium memberships
to fund the work.

Actually, I would vote to make MJ our technical Moderator to replace whats-his-name that went AWOL a year or so ago.

[jose]

Originally Posted by websjapan

if a lot of the load is due to the auctions or for sale why not just add an auction script which will stop the large amount of views/refreshes?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=92857

is one option with vb, but there are loads more from hotscripts etc.

http://www.dnlocal.com/auctions/
http://www.dnlocal.com/eliteauctions/

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

It is clear that SSL flagging is now going to be part of Firefox 3's anti-phishing strategy. That should clear the way for the end to this White List nonsense.

Getting back to the original topic here, I'm not sure how you derive this conclusion.

What they are after here is to show you more easily if a site using SSL is playing tricks or not. This only handles the boldest of phishers, the ones who will try to write bankofamerica.com using cyrillic or greek letters. The bigger case for phishers is to homograph a popular (non SSL) forum or blog domain, duplicate the site, and try to get your information there. As most users will use the same usernames and passwords all across the net, the information facilitates later break-ins to more important sites.

I hear what you're saying, but I seriously doubt that this will sway the FF whitelist policy by even a fraction of a millimeter.

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