XF Bot Guard 1.4.1

[Chromaniac]

i have these listed in Forced challenge IPs/CIDRs/ASNs:

16276
132203
56046

error only shows the bottom two. running the cron task does not appear to have resolved this. i assume it has resolved the first one?

 

[zeeb0t]

i have these listed in Forced challenge IPs/CIDRs/ASNs:

16276
132203
56046

error only shows the bottom two. running the cron task does not appear to have resolved this. i assume it has resolved the first one?

Replicated on my end also. Looking into it, seems to not like the other two. Won't be long.

 

[Chromaniac]

nothing important though! can wait for whenever you release the next update. i am sure i no longer need those asn in that field. this addon has been working fine on default settings. i have 2000 bots right now. no cloudflare protection. and it has been fine lol. thanks again!

 

[zeeb0t]

nothing important though! can wait for whenever you release the next update. i am sure i no longer need those asn in that field. this addon has been working fine on default settings. i have 2000 bots right now. no cloudflare protection. and it has been fine lol. thanks again!

I figured out the problem. The other two ASNs are quite large, and I defined a 1MB ASN limit. So they tripped that and Bot Guard won't save them. I will make a change that boosts the overall limit for each ASN.

Not a "bug" - by design, but, something I can make more flexible.

 

[Chromaniac]

probably a bad idea to have such large asns in that field? i imagine entire field is searched through for matching IP on every single visit?

 

[zeeb0t]

probably a bad idea to have such large asns in that field? i imagine entire field is searched through for matching IP on every single visit?

Not exactly. It stores each CIDR / IP in the ASN dataset into a record in the DB, and that table is high-availability. I wouldn't worry too much about the performance in querying it. I just limited it to 1mb to begin with, so as to protect the cron from importing enormously large ASN and taking too long. But, I am going to up it to 4mb which is still very safe.

Meanwhile, if there is smaller ASN you can use, go ahead.

 

[duderuud]

Dumb question @zeeb0t , a few days ago I donated $20 for your good work.

Would it be possible to hide the donation button when someone donated?

 

[zeeb0t]

Dumb question @zeeb0t , a few days ago I donated $20 for your good work.

Would it be possible to hide the donation button when someone donated?

First, thank you for your support!

Second, it's not an intelligent panel - it isn't tracking anything. But, I will make it so it can be permanently dismissed.

 

[Chromaniac]

so this is not important but i am trying to whitelist mastodon to get link preview working. i am not sure about the exact bot name but online resources say whitelisting the term mastodon should work. now there appears to be a 10 character limit for this so this is not working. just a fyi!

 

[smallwheels]

so this is not important but i am trying to whitelist mastodon to get link preview working. i am not sure about the exact bot name but online resources say whitelisting the term mastodon should work. now there appears to be a 10 character limit for this so this is not working. just a fyi!

Mastodon is a bit of a pita, as the Fediverse is by definition distributed. So you may have loads of different hosts and loads of different bots, belonging to various different instances.

 

[Chromaniac]

yeah this is why i am trying to whitelist for the User-agent patterns for light responses setting. it is not possible to whitelist it by IP ranges.

 

[smallwheels]

yeah this is why i am trying to whitelist for the User-agent patterns for light responses setting. it is not possible to whitelist it by IP ranges.

I did see quite a bunch of different user-agents for mastodon, some instances seem to like to brew their own or there are different forks around. But the number of mastodon instances that referred to my forum was just a handful, still a broad set of user agents.

 

[zeeb0t]

so this is not important but i am trying to whitelist mastodon to get link preview working. i am not sure about the exact bot name but online resources say whitelisting the term mastodon should work. now there appears to be a 10 character limit for this so this is not working. just a fyi!

*Mastodon* should do the trick. Its a character minimum, not limit. This is to prevent people inserting something really short and accidentally giving the world an empty body page.

 

[Chromaniac]

i tried exactly that but the addon requires 10 non wild characters lol. mastodon is eight.

Bot Guard light response user-agent patterns are invalid: Line 34: Pattern must contain at least 10 non-wildcard characters after trimming wildcards.

 

[zeeb0t]

i tried exactly that but the addon requires 10 non wild characters lol. mastodon is eight.

Bot Guard light response user-agent patterns are invalid: Line 34: Pattern must contain at least 10 non-wildcard characters after trimming wildcards.

Doh! My bad. Mastodon seems to have two main formats:

Mastodon/4.x.x (http.rb/5.x.x; +https://instance.example/)
Mastodon/4.x.x (http.rb/5.x.x; +https://instance.example/) Bot

and some older ones, like:

http.rb/5.x.x (Mastodon/4.2.x; +https://instance.example/) Bot
http.rb/5.1.1 (Mastodon/4.2.1; +https://hidden_url.com/)

So, based on that, and to overcome the minimum 10 chars (not including wildcards!) I would go with: *Mastodon/*) Bot and *Mastodon/*)

 

[Chromaniac]

i would confirm here if that fixes the issue with mastodon not showing link previews correctly lol. i understand that there are tons of platforms connected to the ecosystem so it might be hard to fix it for them all. but for now, i would be happy if i can get the link preview to look fine on my own syndicated feed lol. thanks!

 

[zeeb0t]

i would confirm here if that fixes the issue with mastodon not showing link previews correctly lol. i understand that there are tons of platforms connected to the ecosystem so it might be hard to fix it for them all. but for now, i would be happy if i can get the link preview to look fine on my own syndicated feed lol. thanks!

Let me know how you go! Based on what I have read, it should.

 

[Chromaniac]

the above one was not working in the morning. but i added these after checking logs lol and something appears to have worked.

*Mastodon/4*
*Mastodon/5*
*Mastodon/6*
*Mastodon/7*
*http.rb/5.*
*http.rb/6.*
*http.rb/7.*

also just noticed that all the syndicated posts are a few days old which means that rss feed is being blocked. now to see how that can be freed.

i assume Excluded paths and routes would not accept wildcards?

 

[zeeb0t]

the above one was not working in the morning. but i added these after checking logs lol and something appears to have worked.

*Mastodon/4*
*Mastodon/5*
*Mastodon/6*
*Mastodon/7*
*http.rb/5.*
*http.rb/6.*
*http.rb/7.*

also just noticed that all the syndicated posts are a few days old which means that rss feed is being blocked. now to see how that can be freed.

i assume Excluded paths and routes would not accept wildcards?

If you add index.rss to the excluded paths and routes it should allow the rss feeds to be accessed by all.

 

[smallwheels]

If you add index.rss to the excluded paths and routes it should allow the rss feeds to be accessed by all.

Be however aware, that scrapers seem to love using rss-feeds as well to get new targets to scrape.