Asgard Upgrade Details

[LP-Trel]

On January 17th 2008 and February 2nd 2008 a series of major upgrades were put in place that have been in the works for quite some time.

These upgrades have allowed us to upgrade to software versions that are much newer and more capable than those we were running before.

The system is now powered by Apache 2.0 with many new modules and features as well as additional security.

Over the next few months the documentation on the website in the Knowledge Base and at the Helpdesk will need to be updated to reflect the recent changes. If you have any questions just post in the Support Questions forum and we'll try to answer you as soon as we can.

Additional Notes:

1) HTTP POST requests are now filtered by additional filters to help protect the system from robotic spam requests. These have been able to lower the overall system load average by up to 50% during the busiest times of the day.

The filters will block certain phrases related that are commonly used in comment spam related to medical or gambling. These patterns should not show up in normal posts so there should be no problems from using these.

The secondary filtering is now done via RBL lookups whenever an HTTP POST request is sent to the system to a form that might be a target for comment spam.

The RBLs used (at the moment) are:

list.dsbl.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
dnsbl.njabl.org

These are lists of "Bad IPs" and Open Proxies. The lists should not block general browsers and have proved to be very very effective at blocking comment spam.

If you have any questions just post in the Support Questions forum.
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