AutoHotkey Community

- @tank: I said in passing that IE is good for *automation* (get/set all tab titles/urls/zooms, tidy urls, grab unread post urls etc), *not* mass web scraping.
- I know everyone's a volunteer etc, but AutoHotkey is the worst-performing website I currently use, and *slow* is OK, but it's crash-your-computer-level resource-hungry/intensive on IE/Firefox (for some threads).

- @nnnik: Any recommendations?
utilities/websites to test a PC's speed - AutoHotkey Community
https://autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=66037
- What tools do you use to test the forum's performance? If any.

tank wrote: ↑

06 Jul 2019, 20:45

WTF you're going to make me want to going to make me employ some anti scraping solutions arent you. Actually, pissing off you automating this forum might just become my new hobby. Dont come in here complaining about automating this forum or i will......hmmm making anyone loading more than x pages in x seconds get ever and ever increasingly slow wouldnt actually be that hard. keep bitching

I see that you have implemented some kind of “anti-scraping solution” to the forums. After about 10 or so page retrievals there is now a 10 second enforced wait before any new page is retrieved. It is a shame that all must be punished for the problems caused by a few.

@TAC109: If you think the rules should be tweaked, I'd recommend that you private message the admins. Just FYI, I don't do web scraping on the AHK forum, and tank's message doesn't make sense to me.

@tank: Your post doesn't make sense. Loading *one* AHK forum page takes up too much CPU/time (a serious/fundamental problem) ... so you're going to enjoy(?) making visiting multiple webpages more difficult for ordinary users.

i dont have a problem on any modern PC

tank wrote: ↑

08 Jul 2019, 20:24

i dont have a problem on any modern PC

Neither do I. Only after viewing 10 or so posts. The forum has been doing this consistently since the message of yours I quoted previously appeared. I assume that this is as a result of the changes you mentioned. Can you confirm or otherwise?

so outside me being a smart ass we do have a problem with bots on this site. I have throttled the site if x number of hits in x seconds but am still actively working on the right number for both x's

tank wrote: ↑

09 Jul 2019, 07:11

so outside me being a smart ass we do have a problem with bots on this site. I have throttled the site if x number of hits in x seconds but am still actively working on the right number for both x's

Thank you for your candour. As I live in a different timezone to most of the other forum users, when I check in each day there are a lot of new posts for me to browse. (Most of the forum activity occurs while I’m asleep.) I like to check these new posts to improve my knowledge of AHK, and it is really annoying when the artificial throttling occurs. It is hard to believe that this light browsing activity could be mistaken for extreme bot activity.

And, despite the above complaints I am very grateful that you give up your time to help maintain the AHK site.

I am getting throttled - thought it was my net.
What I usually do when I visit the site is open all forums I might want to read in new tabs.
Then I open all subforums and finally topics in new tabs before I start reading.

interesting. how many tabs at once?

holy shit!! i legit thought yall just had some real trash PCs. it wasnt until i tried posting in this thread: https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62550, that convinced me otherwise. just opening the thread already felt kinda sluggish. hitting submit first crashed all my browser extensions, then froze chrome and after some 20s or so crashed chrome as well. now that ive reloaded the thread a bunch of times, it seems im being subject to the same kind of throttling @nnnik was. did fetching this bajillion char codebox three times over exhaust my allotted bandwidth or something opening any forum page now takes as much as 10s, loading and loading and loading, as though cloudflare is checking

this isnt a cloudflare and you had to have loaded much more than 3 pages in a couple minutes. its a 10 second throttle so its an annoyance at best. But i am still tuning the numbers

@swagfag: The link you posted is a great example, thanks. It's really slow to open on IE and Firefox, and fairly sluggish on Chrome. Whether codeboxes, throttling, hardenize, or whatever, it can crash your tabs/processes!
[Editor] Gdip Bitmap Maker - AutoHotkey Community
https://autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=62550

(Scroll up and down a few times to test that a page has fully loaded.)
(Firefox mentioned hardenize a lot, in the ToolTip, as the webpage loaded.)
(Is it possible that one of the causes is turned off for admins/mods?)

doesnt crash my old i5

Again, the problem isn't the forum is slow, the problem is huge posts. Perhaps existing huge code boxes could be auto attached, and future posts simply capped?

Cheers.

https://gist.github.com/nnnik/98771dce417addd2f46533fc9fd1eaf5
Yeah looking through the html tags this code generates - this code box isnt made for a file of that size.

Also idk the exact amount of tabs I open - can vary greatly sometimes I even accidently open the same forum or topics twice.
The upper bounds could be around 15 or so but that isn't the total amount of accesses to the site.

- @Helgef: The problem is *not* huge posts, *all* threads are relatively sluggish compared to in the past. You should look at some other phpBB forums, threads open practically instantly.
- Re. 'auto-attached', I'd rather the threads opened slowly. (We could have a repository like autohotkey.net (don't visit it, it's a spam site) used to be, but that wouldn't solve the underlying problem.)
- Revising the codebox algorithms, restoring the 'code=text' option (to avoid the syntax highlighting burden), or perhaps something completely different, will fix the problem.
- I'd be happier with no changes in the next 12 months, than Helgef's suggestions. The key right now is simply to investigate the true nature of the problem.

The problem is *not* huge posts, *all* threads are relatively sluggish compared to in the past.

Yes the problem is huge posts, there is no reason to maintain the feature huge posts when attachments already exist for that purpose, and other uses.

The key right now is simply to investigate the true nature of the problem.

I'm not sure the people who would invest their free time on this agrees.

What exactly do you need huge posts for?

Cheers.

It's because I've made the code tag to parse the data as ahk by default. Either all of the code tags in these posts should be set to language-txt so prismjs doesn't interpret them OR... I disable auto-parse as ahk...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You are mixing up several issues into one.
The pages an topics with huge amount of syntax highlighting are luggish due to the amount of html tags the codebox generates (doesn't help that there are additional link tags inside the span tags).
This puts a large load on the browser- Google Chrome generally seems to be better at dealing with this amount of tags.
there isn't a lot we can do here - we took the syntax highlighting feature from somewhere else and will have a hard time modifying it.
I honestly don't see the need to switch to another codebox versions - the current one works just not for massive files.

The site is neither intended for the storage or the sharing of massive files in the posts body.
This problem is actually a serious problem since an attacker could purposefully post a topic with so much code that the visitors PCs will crash.
We might have to lower the amount of characters you can post inside code boxes.

Personally I don't think Attatchments are a solution - to me they combine the worst of all the worst attributes.
If you want to host and share your code there are websites specifically made for that - you should use them to share code here.

I also do agree that sharing code is an issue in the forums. Code boxes are not an option - they are made for single files while even basic scripts usually are multiple files.
One soltuon that we discussed in the staff forums would be to add another software to this websites that is specifically made for storing and sharing software and have the forum software interact with it.


The second issue is network related. Jusging from what tank said too many people try to automate the website.
So now we try to catch the bots and limit their access. The rules are still in the making so they might catch legit users.


Afaics there are no other issues. You of course complain about more, but generally most of the stuff you say about forum usage programming etc. has as much relevance to me as the ramblings of a flat earther about the earths shape and geography.
Im only listening and responding to you out of a sense of responsibility to my duty as Administrator here in the forums.
That last sense of duty is slowly declining as you keep complaining about issues when abusing the forum software for something it isn't made for with a 4 year old discontinued browser.

Have a nice day and keep up the good work