[chris (OP)]

Last update of 2019, effectively the first update of 2020!

Dear all

I've made a few minor alterations to the way the systems here work; this is to speed up the forum and the rest of the naked scientists website, and also ensure that we remain up to date in terms of security.

This should not have any negative impact on the operation of the forum, but while we monitor to ensure that the environment is stable, I apologise in advance if anything misbehaves.

One bonus is that you can now check your spellings, so we expect nothing other than perfectly composed posts from now on!

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year!

Chris

[ninaholm]

Thanks for latest updates.

[chris (OP)]

MARCH 2020 - CORONAVIRUS SPECIAL UPDATE!

Hello everyone. I hope that you are all keeping well and we thank you for your contributions to this forum, especially the moderators who do a wonderful job and all deserve our wholehearted gratitude.

Regulars may have noticed that we have taken the unusual step of creating a special new board to accommodate the enquiries we have been receiving about COVID-19.

We felt this was justified because this is a specialist topic that is generating a high volume of traffic and will be easier for us all to curate and browse with all of the posts gathered together in that venue.

Could I ask, therefore, that if you decide to start a new topic relevant to COVID-19, please use the above-linked board to post it.

Many thanks, and stay well!

[Eternal Student]

One bonus is that you can now check your spellings,

   Thanks.  Minor question is this   US,   UK   or International English  spelling.    Can we switch it to our own preference?

[chris (OP)]

SERVER MIGRATION UPDATE - May 2023

Hello everyone. I wanted to bring you up to speed on what's been happening in the background recently.

After 17 years, the company that had hosted us through most of this site's lifetime were taken over by a new kid on the tech block. The "new broom" decided to make a clean sweep of existing relationships like the one we had and asked us to pay ?25,000 per year for our webservers, or pack up and go. I attempted to negotiate a bit, having pointed out that they'd had 120M+ brand impressions through us just on our podcast, but to no avail. Their best offer was still stupid amounts of money for what amounted to an annual electricity bill (the servers were already set up and running and had cost nothing in maintenance for a decade).

Unsurprisingly, I decided to exit and set up our own hosting from Naked Scientists Towers. This has involved quite a bit of behind the scenes work to migrate everything across and make it work stably; I was especially worried about this forum because it's notoriously fickle and doesn't like to budge from its home.

It looks like it's moved across okay, and I hope the user experience is tolerable. I'm still doing a lot of optimisations behind the scenes now to make things work better. There is always a bedding in phase with new setups where one strives to find the config "sweet spot" for the stack that's running. We're just at the start of this process at the moment, so it will hopefully continue to improve from hereon in.

My plans for this year are to upgrade this forum to newer iterations of the software, which should make it run more slickly, grow our user base more, and upgrade the theme to a more contemporary look. Suggestions, though, for the latter in particular, would be most welcome. And any coders and web gurus out there who would be willing to help, do please drop me a line.

Meanwhile, thanks for your energy and contributions, especially to the moderators!

Chris

[chris (OP)]

12th MARCH 2025 - UPDATE AND NEWS

Hello everyone. I'm shocked that nearly 2 years have passed since I last penned an update notice here. At the time I last wrote, we were migrating the website to our own servers, which we have achieved and managed to keep everything running relatively stably.

FIGHTING AI SCRAPERS AND BOTS
All the same, we've faced quite a challenge lately, which is that seemingly all of a sudden we are being hit very hard by "bots"; these are relentlessly scraping the data from this forum, and my suspicion is that a lot of this activity is being used to train AI models. The agents behind these bots have programmed them very aggressively. They constantly change their IP addresses to prevent simple blocking techniques, and they fire off hundreds of requests per second. This hammers the database very hard, slowing down the performance of the forum and making it frustrating to use at times. I'm sorry about this. I know it's a real nuisance.

We've been working on this quite hard behind the scenes, and we have now put in place some strategies to try to fight back against this assault. Hopefully you'll find the user experience has now improved. We'll keep at it.

EMAILS ARE BACK!
Another minor "win" this week is that I have now been able to restore the email system, enabling users to reset lost passwords, register new accounts and also receive notifications when other users respond to threads in which they have participated previously. If you signed up to receive Naked Scientists Forum emails, you should start to receive these again.

ACCOUNT SECURITY
To prevent abuse of this system, we have taken the precaution of locking existing accounts that have not been accessed recently. The login message has been updated to reflect this and contains some simple instructions to follow to get an account reactivated, if you've been affected.

As a matter of course, I would urge everyone here to review and, if necessary, change your login passwords to ensure that you are using a strong, suitably resilient password fit for 2025. The assaults on websites like this one are intensifying and we always want to try to stay one step ahead.

THANKS
In parting, thanks again to everyone who participates in this forum; the wealth of information and guidance we have assembled here over the last 20 years is breath taking and we can all be proud of our efforts to welcome everyone into the world of science.

I'll continue to work on the website and servers to keep everything running smoothly. Don't forget, of course, that we're also pumping out multiple podcasts per week, which are available here: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/podcasts - please do tune in!

Until the next time,

Chris

[alancalverd]

and my suspicion is that a lot of this activity is being used to train AI models.

God help anyone who relies on an AI system that has scraped this barrel. Don't burn those oldfashioned textbooks!

[alancalverd]

I'm now receiving email notifications of fleets of "new members" whose names look suspiciously like AI-generated spam. How can I turn these notifications off, and is there no means of verifying the humanity of such interlopers?

[chris (OP)]

Please see the explanation in the mods discussion, Alan.

[Petrochemicals]

The "quote" function is no longer working as it did. I used to be able to highlight a piece of text, hit the quote drop down function and the selected piece of text would quote. Now it insists on quoting the entire passage line and verse.