Weekly Briefing Release 15 Dec 15 - Dec 22
/catcollection has been nominated as WOTD
The world /catcollection has been nominated as the WOTD on December 22, 2024 at 8:57 PM EST.
French visitors have paid a visit
Starting on December 21, people from the Aywen community visited OWOT and its Discord server. A containment world was established on /aywen by Lemuria, which successfully reduced scripting and pasting activity on the front page. The spawn was still not without pasting incidents, which isn't unusual for OWOT to start with.
This event is not recognized as a raid.
Server outages on Saturday
Because of scripting activity on those containment worlds, the server went down for several minutes at a time. The rate limits on those worlds were reduced as a mitigation measure. These events were not malicious in any way and were due to a performance issue in the server.
The performance issue was subsequently investigated. Because of a flaw in the traffic monitor which is used to diagnose issues with the server and mitigate attacks, incorrect metrics were reported which threw the investigation off. The traffic monitor was reporting only a small percentage of what the actual network usage was, which complicated the investigation. Shortly after the traffic monitor was patched, we were able to determine the root cause to this performance issue and start working on a fix.
Permanent IDs for anonymous chat users
On December 18, it was announced that anonymous chat users will start having a permanent ID attached to their messages. Currently, users are assigned a random ID ranging from 1 to 9999. Whenever a user refreshes their page, a new ID is assigned.
Previously, the plan was to generate the ID by hashing the IP address of the users with the addition of a (private) salt to prevent the original IP from being brute forced. However, this was changed in favor of generating a completely random ID that is simply attached to a user's IP address.
This plan is still being refined, with an implementation being ready. OPSEC considerations are still being made without giving spammers an advantage.
The goal is to make it harder for spammers to bypass blocks by simply refreshing their tab.