If you hit Projects recently, you may have noticed the site running slow or not responding.
I can’t be certain, but I think that had something to do with the comments. I decided to re-open them for a while with “hold for approval” selected and some basic keyword filtering to reduce the adult spam. That immediately gained me a list of spam in Cyrillic that, when translated, was more-or-less meaningless, as well as the expected adult website spam. But site performance also started to suffer with random timeouts, poor image retrieval, and just overall slow times. The host’s site tools would similarly time out.
Commenting on boards such as mine is highly weaponized. I expected nothing - and got it. Comments closed, some code was modified to remove the ability to get into the comment form or feed, and that was that.
But, site performance came back pretty much within an hour or two of doing that.
What did I find?
After the two brain cells I have left managed to connect “Site performance better” + “Right after comments closed” = 4, I pulled the logs for the last few weeks. I found what I was looking for:
14.184.185.155 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:02:01 -0400] "GET /projects/index.php/2026/01/15/the-sabtronics-2010a-dvm-part-1-checkout-and-observations/comments/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5646 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36"
Just page after page after page of bots like Claude, SEMrush, Petalbot, and countries like Egypt, Viet Nam, China, and Germany slamming the site trying to retrieve the comments feeds on both the production and (now turned off) dev site I was using to test new themes. Once I turned that feed off and removed the dev site, a few more 404s and then the storm was gone.
Analysis and thoughts on the spammers and slammers.
You’ll notice some familiar names in there. Claude, is of course, Anthropic’s AI bot, and it was a very bad actor. I’m considering blocking this one via IP and name just because they are hard on things. SEMRush is SEO, so someone is indexing my site with that. I saw Huawei’s bot, Meta’s bot, ByteDance’s bot, and others, all slamming to get those comments. Same posts, over and over and over. I haven’t even located the comment posters yet, there’s so much noise.
The minute they (comments) were gone, it stopped and performance was back. Would that have eventually slowed as these bots finally filled their need for new URL indexing, or would they have assumed that a comments feed might get comments so it needs to be checked over and over? I have no idea, but regardless of that, comments were not useful on this page and they are gone. Because of the way this blogging platform works, you’ll see “🐗❤️” instead, which just takes you to the post from the main feed, or the top of the post when viewing a single post.
As always, if you’d like to comment on something, please use either Mastodon or the Telegram feeds: Channel Feed and Chat Channel - anyone can join the feed, it generally follows here but I do post one-off shots of things I’m working with or find interesting. The chat feed is by approval, but I generally won’t disapprove unless the person is spamming.
If you want to follow what’s going on here, there’s now a telegram channel. It will generally follow the blog, with perhaps a few more messages about events here and there, as well as pictures of things I see while out and about that could be of interest to the channel but don’t warrant a full post.
Check it out: https://t.me/wereboarprojects. You will, of course, need Telegram but you can preview the feed without joining.
There’s also a chat channel: https://t.me/wereboar_projects_chat - it’s open to all but new members must be approved. This is just to prevent spambots.
Early boar ticket prices end March 1st, after that the price goes from $26 to $30. This ticket gets you in for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th. Ordering now also gives the post office plenty of time to deliver to you.
If you’d like to comment on a post, please do so - click the link at the bottom of each post that has the word comment in it.
You’ll need a name, and will have to answer a simple question to submit your comment. After that, I’ve set it up so that they are hidden until I can review them - while this won’t stop the spammers, you won’t see it until I make sure it’s not spam. I’ll try and look at any posted comments a couple times a week.
Let me know what you think about the work I’m doing, if you like it (or don’t like it, I’ll take constructive criticism,) or even if you’d like to see more of something I’ve posted. Keep it clean, things that are obviously spam, bait, and profanity won’t be visible.
They’re closed again. Strange Russian spam that I couldn’t figure out what they were posting for, and posts that mention sites that only talk about fans…there’s nothing of use here. Please use mastodon to comment, or join the telegram channels.
There was also the oddity of poor performance shortly after I re-opened the comments, all of which vanished the moment I closed them and removed the links from pages. I have to wonder if someone was slamming the site trying to post comments only to be rejected due to the simple keyword filtering I installed. I’ll know more when I do forensics on the logs.
One of the things that has been suggested to me is a quick way to find all of the major projects that have appeared on this blog. The easiest way for me to do this would be as you see it here: a single post, similar to hamfest pictures, that collects all of the major device projects that have appeared here.
This hub contains all the the things I am currently working on, or have completed. New projects that are still underway generally appear at the bottom of the post, and the post will grow as more are added. The only things that are not here is a few small things that I did for other people, or the home automation stuff. You can find the latter in a new category on the sidebar aptly labeled “Automation”.
There’s a permanent link on the sidebar that will bring you directly to this hub post.
Click on the title of each item to be taken to that project’s hub.
If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed something different.
There’s a new theme set for the page.
Why? Well - as the world becomes more mobile, the site needs be mobile friendly. While I liked the simplicity of the previous theme, it didn’t react well to mobile and made viewing on your phone difficult. This template is reactive, and shows the site better to both desktop and mobile. I’ll make a few small changes, like the top image, but overall I like this. It’s clean, the colors are calm and pleasing, and it does react well to mobile. I’m still playing with some things, so there’s a few placeholders. I’m also going to try and update Flatpress to a newer version, but that’s going to be in a testing directory - you shouldn’t see any “the way this works” changes until I’m satisfied that the system is operational.
If you’re not seeing a new theme, ctrl+F5 should clear your cache and reload fresh.
I recently undertook a task to clean up and optimize images here on Projects, both for size and content. Some of the images were simply enormous, and some were showing stuff not relevant to the task at hand. You don’t need to have 5MB of image downloaded just to show you my bench with a single part on it. It can be much smaller. I also wanted to name things with a more universal convention.
That has been, more or less, completed. There’s a few images hanging out in hamfest folders that could be touched again, but for the most part they’re fine. And a couple I missed in QA…
Enter part 2.
Flatpress has a plugin that allows the pages to present a set of metadata that makes it more friendly towards searching. I’ve decided to (slowly) go through the pages here, add descriptions and keywords, and hopefully make the site easier to find what you’re looking for. This is probably going to take a while, but you shouldn’t see any interruptions on the front end of the site. I’m going to be working forwards from 2021, with 2026 already fully metadata’d.
Thank you for visiting Projects. I hope you’ve found something of interest here.
Progress:
2026: Done
2025: Done, and found some missing images.
2024: Done, and found some missing images.
2023: Done, and found some missing images.
2022: Done
2021: Done
This project is pretty much done. I’m going to set the search engines loose on the site in the coming weeks, hopefully more links to the site should show up and provide easier searching.
While still about 4 months away, there’s no better time to get your ticket as you can get the early boar price of $26, mailed to you at no extra charge. This is good for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th.
Ticket prices increase March 1st, so there’s no time like the present to get one if you plan on attending. Get your ticket here: https://hamvention.org/purchase-tickets/
It’s been a while since I’ve zipped up all the files in the document library, so it’s high time I do it again.
If you’d like a copy of everything I’ve collected for projects here, you can grab a copy of it from dropbox: https://www.dropbox. … ro3&st=djfaezpv&dl=0. The file is about 410MB, and is all of the files in a big .zip for easy extraction.
Used to be every technician had a set of them in their toolbox. They were a required purchase when I was a student in vocational electronics. My set generally vanished years ago, and Radio Shack quit selling them long before they became a piece of history.
Turns out you can still get that exact same set. It’s not in the ratshackpack, but you take what you can get.
So I guess I’ll be over here playing with my diddlestick.
