flood control?

[Abram K-J]

Just curious what is the reasoning behind the "flood control" that shows up when I search for a second time in the forums within a few seconds? Also curious why there is the quota of "likes" for a day.

[Getinthebible]

No one has answered your questions so I thought I would at least give you my opinion, so that you would not feel ignored. I however am not an expert.

 

I think that the reasoning for limiting the number of searches in a given time is to keep the server from being over loaded by massive traffic. It is a function active on most forums that I am apart of. This allows everyone to be able to use the search feature without encountering major delays. That is how it has been explained to me anyway.

 

I am unsure as to the "likes". My best guess is that the "likes" feature was designed to help others validate people's advice or judge the trustworthiness of someone's opinion. If users go around "liking" everything the relevance is diluted.

[Abram K-J]

Thanks for your reply. I'd actually not encountered that before. Perhaps the settings should be adjusted--literally a 2nd search I do within seconds of completing a first search triggers "flood control." I find that an annoyance. But your explanations make sense, and thanks for it.

 

EDIT: One area where flood control works against easy use of the forums, for example, is when I search "LXX," get no results, then quickly think to try "Septuagint" instead, but flood control does not permit me without first waiting...

Edited November 23, 2012 by AbramKJ

[R Gustason]

Flood control is a setting the admins can control. A value of 0 disables it, but is not recommended for admins to disable it because of the aforementioned server load. What happens is "robots" or small search engine scripts used by Google and Yahoo will send search queries to search engines on other sites in order to collect web page results for their search indexes. Obviously, if several search engine robots are firing off search after search, you could see how it could quickly bog down a server. Administrators could set it at 2-3 seconds then the wait would be less.

 

The likes quota is to prevent it from being cheapened as Getinthebible has suggested.

 

I used to be an administrator on several Christian based forums, have since gotten out of the business because of the time it takes away from accomplishing other things.

 

Hope those answers help!

[Abram K-J]

Thanks, Ryan--good explanations here.

[arcanemuse]

Flooding in IRC is roughly the same thing. Repeated pings or requests for information on a server can knock it offline. DDOS attacks are similar in nature. You pound away at a server with repeated requests for data over and over and over again and it will eventually either loose bandwidth or crash... or both. You have to count on the vilest of people to crawl forth from the sewers of the internet armed with programs designed to do these sorts of things. It is sad that some have nothing better to do than things like this and even sadder that we must insitute protocols to protect ourselves against them. It is, however, very necessary. Virus scanners (if you are misforunate enough to have to use a PC running Windoze) are a part of everyday life for many. Viruses are the work of the very same trolls that flood and do other evil things on the internet just for the sake of doing them.

[Joel Brown]

For the record, to 'Active Members' I've reduced the flood control and liking restrictions a bit.