The Watering Hole

General Discussion
8 posts
I dropped by Andy Z's forum yesterday.  I've been a member for years. It used to be the goto place but I also haven't been there for years now either.

Anyway......it's ever more dead than this place....just saw a tumble weed blow by.   Just about all guitar forums seem to be really quiet these days.
Too true.  I think there's about six of us that converse there regularly.  Ten years ago it was the place to be!
I hadn't logged in there in a long time.  It took me awhile to remember my login.  I used to look in there quite a bit, but was never a real active member.  I was looking at one of the old threads there.  That was the first place we started posting music, I believe.  I believe that is what started the Wateringhole FNJ's.  There was a thread there that a bunch of us posted on.  We were all gung ho XT.  LOL ;D  Except Lance.

The thread was started by Rich S.  called "Let's Jam".
I still get e-mails from Az from one of his new business ventures, and he is a Facebook friend, so I see whatever exploits he is involved in. But I don't think I ever participated in The Institute of Noise forum, if so it was only rarely.
I do wish there was more conversation here. Unfortunately, I just can't manage having the registration open with the current forum format.  Most days, having registration open meant between 100 and 500 spam registrations from Russia and China, and cleaning them out was taking me a lot of time.  No one can register now unless I register them.  As for the FNJs going away, people have gotta post them to make them happen.  I'd love to, but I'm just super busy.  I'm considering doing a forum refresh and installing a later version of the software but it's not guaranteed I'll be able to get everything back up...
charger — Jul 28, 2014I do wish there was more conversation here. Unfortunately, I just can't manage having the registration open with the current forum format.  Most days, having registration open meant between 100 and 500 spam registrations from Russia and China, and cleaning them out was taking me a lot of time.  No one can register now unless I register them.  As for the FNJs going away, people have gotta post them to make them happen.  I'd love to, but I'm just super busy.  I'm considering doing a forum refresh and installing a later version of the software but it's not guaranteed I'll be able to get everything back up...


If you have no reason to accept any traffic from Russia and other known countries of hacking, and if this is hosted on your own server, you could simply block those coutries ip address ranges from gaining any access to the server at all.   I use http://www.beethink.com/BeeGuardian/IPBlocker/IPBlocker.htm on my servers and have completely eliminated all those countries that are known for hacking to have any access to my servers at all.   I have blocked all of Russia, China, Korea and tons more and it has made a huge difference to the amount of bogus hits on the server.  Worth taking a look as you would then be able to open up the forum to registrations. I totally get that about being really busy....same here, just seems to be very little time for hobbies at the moment, the business has to come first.
Hackers from India were a huge hassle for a couple of months in the SONAR forums.  In the dart forum that I'm a senior admin on we have the IP ranges blocked and haven't had any spammers for quite a while now.
Here's a good site for getting ip address ranges by country

http://www.nirsoft.net/countryip/