It's a way to help you prevent yourself from spending too much time on News.YC. If you turn it on you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
Still investigating, but Nick just turned off the site for non logged-in users to take the load off the system while we try to figure out what's going on.
It is interesting that this is the exact opposite action Reddit takes when they are having server problems. I wonder what that says about each respective community.
Reddit's previously stated that non-logged-in users cause substantially lower resource consumption per user - I imagine that's a more likely explanation.
Presumably there's only so much caching you can do it this case - the points change on articles every second. Not like everyone has to see the most up to date content but it would be a trade off (that many wouldn't like)
It's awesome pg responds so quickly... I'm wondering if he gets alerted (probably) or if he's on here a lot (probably). Maybe we could DDOS his alert system with threads about pg rated movies...
And an aside- does pg have the most karma of any HN user?
"If we could stop hiring amazing people off HN, I could probably break the habit
Rather than trying to break the habit you could always hire a ghost commenter to carry on. With you occasionally checking in to throw off everyone's scent.
It used to be in the main header but was removed so as to stop encouraging people attempting to get a higher 'score'. (A group I was in. Getting into the top 100 was my goal one year, and I pulled it off by contributing lots.)
To elaborate, I think they began using Cloudflare just the other day, as a solution to the DDoS. I was able to get through by the time I checked it in the morning from home, but after getting to work I still couldn't access it for hours while the DNS change propagated.
Yeah things were really rocky for me for a couple of days. Down completely yesterday and periodic "bad gateway" messages earlier today. Seems to be working better now. Was refreshing like a crack addict :/
About 5-10 minutes ago, each time I'd refresh I was logged in as another user. On a side note, what's it mean when that user's header is cyan instead of orange?
CF can cause a small DoS as it does some aggressive pre-fetching. So your server needs to handle short bursts really well. Not to mention whitelist CF's IP space both in the firewall and nginx rate limiting.
This might be unrelated, but I'm constantly being prompted for captcha even when I'm just viewing and not trying to respond. Can something be done about this?
It shows up with the HN theme (orange bar at top and beige background) but without other links/text like user info on the right or the footer. I first noticed it the other day when I started using a wired connection at work instead of WiFi.
