Dear members and friends of ipernity,

1) The Good News.
Slow but determined work gets the job done.


We can report that the download to pc, and the creation/change of icon and banner for a user's home page, and for groups, are again working. And that the AI driven content scrapers causing the overload have finally been blocked, (mm/dd below).

2) Progress on our server issues.

Please read all of the below carefully

The Story
Back in April our servers began being attacked by bots and scrapers to the point that we had to restart servers every hour in order to keep the website running. This was the most recent increase in this battle lasting over a year. Even with this action you may have experienced extra slow loading of pages or even error messages and no loading of pages at all.

Since it was not possible for us to continue restarting servers every hour, we have engaged outside IT support from IT Assurance (located in Portland, Oregon) in order to keep the website running normally and to help us find the best ways to keep the bots and scrapers off our website.

Know that this is not unique to our website. Any photo heavy website has to deal with the same type of thing. Our disadvantage is that we are volunteers with experience in only certain areas. Therefore we have to pay outside service providers to help us. This is a necessary added expense that is challenging our budget. The hope is that the outside support can stabilise us enough to only need them a couple times a year, but that is an unknown at this point.

Some Details and Progress Made
As this is very complicated, and as there have been some unexpected and unwanted side affects due to some of the measures taken, it has had to be a slow iterative process. Implementing a different blocking rule at a time, logging the data and then checking it. Also affecting progress is the 8 hour time difference between Rob and IT Assurance, and the 2 week scuba diving he took recently.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) in their Web Application Firewall (WAF) section offer various rules for identifying and blocking unwanted traffic. However, to be used they require a level of expertise that we had to seek from IT Assurance.

The first phase has been to implement some of these WAF rules just to add overdue protection to the site. Sadly, the 'bot' blocking rules proved ineffective against the AI type of content scrapers. Only now with data collected and analysed has it been possible to finally have bespoke rules written that do reduce the overload. As only just implemented this month, the ongoing effectiveness is yet to be confirmed.

What This Means for our Members
1) Any further disruptions to the website should be minimal.
2) Cost increases may need to be considered before the next annual meeting.
3) Members will need patience while we work on finding solutions to the current unwanted side effects.
4) New issues can be reported via Help & Contact - but please note that reporting already known issues (see below) only takes time away from us fixing them. It's important that you include the following information in any new issue reported:

• URL of the page with the error.
• Day/Time of error (and time zone you are in).
• Your computer or phone's operating system.
• Browser you use.

Known Issues Currently Under Investigation
1) Applications that require authenticated API access fail (this only effects special features and outside use of ipernity, not everyday use of the website).
2) Daily News emails are not being delivered consistently.
3) Setting or editing the geo-position of images.

Everyone on the team is also an ipernity club member and so we also hope for quick solutions to all these issues, but we have to ask for your patience as we do have to take one step at a time.

Your ima team.