InsaneJournal Announcements

We've been seeing a massive uptick in bot requests lately, leading to an outage that happened today. We have implemented some new rules at the edge of the network to attempt to mitigate the issue.

Please let us know if you start seeing excessive new errors as part of this is attempting to limit connections from non end user sources. We need to be sure we aren't causing undue complications in efforts to keep the site available.

We have ended our Holiday Sale. However, we are leaving Permanently Insane accounts on sale at their regular price until the end of the year!!

Next month we are doubling all non coupon Patreon rewards!! So our Patreon members can get in on the sale too! This will apply to payments processed the first week of December.

https://www.patreon.com/insanejournal

The InsaneJournal Holiday sale is live.

For now until December 6th you can get a bargain on InsaneJournal account upgrades. Check out the InsaneJournal store for sales info including Permanently Insane accounts and Insane Userpics on sale!

Please note that Insane Userpics require you to have a Permanently Insane account. This feature is enabled manually so it may take a day or two for your account to get upgraded.

I'd like to let everyone here know that support requests and site issues that require my attention may be delayed. We are dealing with prepping for the upcoming hurricane here in Florida. Thankfully we are not directly in the path but we are close enough that we are preparing anyways.

If you are opening a support request about site slowness or errors, give the exact time and time zone you are in so we can correlate your issue to logs on our side.

Site reliability: We have made significant progress in scaling the site to handle increased traffic loads. Unfortunately whatever has been sending so much traffic to us has taken advantage of this and is sending even more traffic our way. We have made further strides and the site is stable again after a tough week last week. We saw upwards of 1 Million requests per minute at one point.

Site support: Please be aware that our support volunteers have a direct line of communication with site administration (me). They do relay your concerns to me and if they state something about the status of the site, please accept that as fact. Also please understand that these people are volunteering their time to help make the site a better place to be. Kindness and patience will go a long way. If you are frustrated with the site and want to take it out on me, that's one thing. Please do not take your frustrations out on our support team.

Site funds: We have seen a significant drop off in sales on the site. And that's understandable with the issues we've been seeing. That said it's getting more expensive to run the site month to month. We are still not in a dire state nor are we looking to shut down. In fact we are still financially stable. That said if you have been considering subscribing to our Patreon we have some great rewards there that I think are the best value you can get outside of our holiday sale.

Got some reports of the site acting up a bit the past couple of days. In response I've made some tuning adjustments to the site to see if we can make it more responsive. From what I can tell it's been very effective. Please continue making reports of when the site isn't behaving so we can know what too look for.

One of our most prolific users and the person who is responsible for so many great layouts on this site and others like it is in need. tessisamess lost a child in a very sudden and unexpected way. Tess is looking for donations to a GoFundMe. That have kindly asked for no religious-based condolences and I ask that you respect that on this post as well.

If you are able to help there is a GoFundMe setup to help cover funeral expenses.

https://gofund.me/3d7468a4

Yesterday I made a mistake. We have been getting a large amount of abuse I and tied that abuse to IP addresses. What I failed to realize is how many of our users use the same VPNs. This caused me to unfairly ban a lot of users who were not doing anything wrong.

This was wrong of me and I have undone all of the bans from yesterday. To anyone who was not committing abuse, I sincerely apologize for getting you caught up in this.

We have altered our criteria for what we are looking for which I will still not publicly disclose as that will allow abusers to just avoid.

I understand we have likely also undid the ban on users who were committing abuse too. Please take this as a notice that NO form of harassment is acceptable on InsaneJournal. We will notice and we will suspend all of your accounts regardless of your paid status or how long you have been on this site.

I want to thank everyone for their patience while we have been handling Denial of Service attacks against our site. We believe this is related to a user or group of users who have been banned from the site for harassment. It appears the attacks have subsided for now, but we will continue to monitor and deal with them as best we can.

On a related note, we have been continuing to see harassment of our users and have a zero-tolerance policy for it. Understand that while we do have a volunteer support team who I trust, they do not have the ability to suspend any accounts, and I personally validate any complaints. If the harassment is severe, I will not hesitate to suspend ALL accounts related to the harasser.

If you are found to be aiding someone who is harassing users, you are also eligible to be suspended. We want InsaneJournal to be a space where people can role-play and journal without worrying about being attacked.

We are continuing to get attacks on our site. They had slowed down the past few days but picked up again last evening. We are doing all we can to abate them but the nature of these kinds of attacks is very hard to solve for. We will continue monitoring and blocking them when we can. Please have patience with us as we do our best to provide the site uptime that you deserve.

We are working on getting memory caching restored. It has a lot to do with the slowness of the site even when we're not under load. Please understand that this was causing major bugs and it seems most would rather the site slow than to have comments missing here and there.

It seems whatever the traffic that has been hitting our site has backed off. We have been working on integrating better traffic monitoring so we can get a real view into what is going on with the site. This has paid dividends in helping us to better tune our tools that handle keeping rouge traffic away. We feel that the better site performance is a combination of our blocking and whatever was hitting us so hard stopping as well.

You may have seen some new captchas or challenges popping up. This is in order to combat rouge traffic. The challenges should happen without minimal interaction, that is just the new firewall making sure that you're a human and not a bot. The captchas are more invasive but we are doing our best to limit them as much as possible. We may be introducing some new ones especially on login and singup pages. Please don't be alarmed to see them.

So lately we've seen an uptick in issues on the site.

1) Comments disappearing/reappearing. I believe that this is due to the site's code bing a bit older yet we were using a newer version of our database caching software. It seems that the cache wasn't getting updated and was delivering the site without specific comments until something on the page changed causing the cache to get updated. All comments have always been safe in the database but the caching layer hasn't been handling it. For now we think things are good with this particular issue.

2) The 504 errors. We have been tracking a MAJOR uptick in bot activity on the internet. These are programs that many developers are using to scrape content from the internet. We are looking to see what we can do to reduce the amount of bot traffic and help the site be more stable. We are also looking into ways to help us recover from outages faster. Right now it can take 10-20 minutes for the automated recovery to help the site get back to normal after it crashes. We hope to significantly reduce this.

All in all, we're working on it and we haven't abandoned the site at all. This is all just part of running a small site on the internet and dealing with how it changes.

Hello InsaneJournal Users,

I want to announce here that we have re-formed our Abuse team here on InsaneJournal and are taking actions to curb the bulling and abuse that has been happening. I personally want to apologize for not taking action sooner which has created an unsafe culture here. We are working to put a stop to it.

Going forward if you are experiencing abuse or bulling inside of an asylum please first raise the issue to asylum mods as they are responsible for handling their own communities. If it is outside of an asylum and you are getting messages or are being bullied or harassed by users. Or if asylum mods are not taking actions, please open a support request selecting "Abuse" as the problem area. These support request are only visible to our Abuse team and will be treated with discretion.

Be aware that we will take actions on abuse/bullying that happens off site and your InsaneJournal account can be suspended if you are harassing users on any platform.

Thank you for your understanding.

--
Squeaky

Hey gang,

I know some users are seeing bad ads that are leading to your browser giving you an error about the site's security. If you can, please compile a list of the sites in the warnings that are giving this error.

( examples )