HCC Rides Again!

Hey gang, thought I'd do a quick post to document the saga of the site over the last week for anyone who missed any episodes or who wasn't sure where we stand now.

Last Thursday (I think?? Covid has rendered the passage of time abstract at best), an aggressive bot from The Netherlands hit our site and maxed out our site bandwidth and CPU for several hours by downloading files continually at high speeds. This was sucky but not that unusual, as this kind of thing actually happens at least twice every month, in addition to the constant stream of attempts to break the password to log onto our server. I'm not entirely sure what the bandwidth-hogging bots are trying to do, I've always assumed they were scraping all the photos off my travel blog to use to sell timeshares in Uzbekistan. But since they're downloading 10 megabytes of data per second for hours on end, they'd have to be scraping the entirety of HCC, my blog and hipsoda.com over and over again endlessly for that to make any sense, which wouldn't make any sense. So I'm not sure what the game is there.

One thing I did want to make clear, however, is that there's absolutely no reason to believe this was anything targeted at HCC specifically for who we are or who we love or whose AirBnB kitchen I allegedly caught on fire. You didn't piss somebody off with your Trump caps, because the only people who can see your Trump caps are other HCC users and we're awesome. And though I love the idea of Jimmy Fallon's movie Taxi being cursed, because this happened right after we added it to the site, I was kidding about Jimmy Fallon fans being behind this. They couldn't be, because Jimmy Fallon fans are imaginary, like werewolves. And even if they did exist, they wouldn't be able to see what's going on at HCC without a login.

This is, sadly, just the reality of running a website in 2020. If 50% of web traffic is viagra emails, 90% of the rest is bots trying to break into sites so they can use them to send out more viagra emails. This has been the situation the entire time I've been running HCC. Back when we were on Hostgator, this kind of thing was their problem and they had staff to deal with it (poorly, because the one time HCC was ever "hacked" was when Hostgator itself was hacked). Once I had set up my own server so that HCC could keep on growing and thriving, this BS became my problem.

The HCC Server (pictured)

Over the years I've dealt with the bots in various ways, all of them a total pain in the ass. The most successful measure turned out to be just blocking all web traffic from Russia. Sorry, human Russians. But over time my hands gradually became more and more tied by the fact that the software running on our server was old. Old software becomes more vulnerable over time as various hacks are discovered, plus you can't take advantage of any of the new security tools that come out. I had avoided updating our software because the next version of PHP (the software that creates the actual pages your browser views, which allows the site to do all the dynamic things it does, things you couldn't do with static HTML files) instituted some radical changes to make it more secure. Changes that meant I'd have to rewrite every single page on the site for HCC to continue to work after the update.

Naturally, I chose to not do this and just hope the world would end before I had to actually deal with this. Pandemic? Check! Riots right outside my window? Check! They made a TV show out of The Purge? Yeesh.

And yet, the world stubbornly refused to end, and this damned Dutch bot was pressing the issue. After spending half the morning trying to block the bot from accessing the site and eating up all of our server resources (which would ultimately either crash the site and/or cause me to have to pay for more bandwidth) with no success because the tools I needed were not available for our old-ass OS, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and upgraded everything on our server. Boom, site down, bot gone, time to rebuild.

What followed were about five days of just an inhumane amount of coding. On one hand, the whole thing went a little easier than I was expecting, but only because I was expecting I'd need to just set the site on fire, collect the insurance money, change my name and move to Panama. It was still a bear to fix. But, importantly, a bear that it was actually possible to wrestle to the ground and force to take his ringworm pills. Getting that done was a huge relief and it makes me really happy seeing the site back to its old self. I even fixed a few minor annoyances along the way, so it could be argued that we're better than ever.

Update 6/27: I had originally written here that Old School Mode had to be retired, but I figured out a way to replicate it that doesn't involve the nightmare of maintaining two entirely different versions of the site that this mode used to require. The cap-editing and link-displaying windows will still pop up in the floating blue boxes (since they just work much better this way), but the caption-entry window will fill the entire tab if you have Old School Mode turned on in the settings at the bottom of the gallery. If you had the site set to Old School Mode previously, it should turn back on automatically if your browser's cookie is still in place. Even if you don't have Old School Mode turned on, you can accomplish this same "full screen cap entry" thrill by right-clicking the screengrab and selecting "New Tab," so I don't personally see the burning need for this mode. But, people have been asking about it and it wasn't that much work once I figured it out, so enjoy.

For a minute there I thought I was going to have to retire our other special modes as well, Caption This! Mode (a skin that makes HCC look just like Caption This! from the scifi.com days) and Solo Mode (a setting where you can cap by yourself in a gallery filled with your friends' captions) but these ended up being relatively easy to update and since I don't bother keeping those modes up to speed with new features, they're no burden to keep running. I don't think either mode gets used much to be honest, but they're still fun curiosities just to have on the shelf. One of the blessings of this process has been being reminded of dusty corners of HCC even I had forgotten about, like those two fun modes and things like our Uncapped Grabs Smorgasbord.

Update 6/9: When I first posted this earlier today, I wrote about how the second casualty in all of this was the Capper Wiki, since I didn't code that one (Arch just threw it at me when he went on the run) and the Wiki software was both incompatible with the site updates and so old that it was impossible to update. But since then, I had a brainstorm and managed to install a new Wiki and manually import all of the old wiki's content, which sucked as much as that sounds like. To my surprise I think it's all actually correct and up to date now, and I think it's safe to say the Wiki has been yanked out of the fire and put back on its shelf, only slightly singed. Yay! This probably doesn't matter much in the big picture since nobody had contributed to the Wiki in ages, but I'm happy to have it back for the sake of completeness and as a window into capping history.

Anyway, hopefully that explains what in the hell is going on around here. I mainly wanted to (1) Reassure people that they didn't cause HCC to shit the bed and (2) Reassure people that this doesn't mean HCC's in danger or is going to disappear. The danger isn't any higher than it has always been, and now we're in a much, much better position to fend it off. The site wasn't breached and the shutdown was intentional to make some long-overdue security improvements. As far as I know I've got everything working now, if you notice anything off let me know. The most likely problem you'll see is settings not sticking, because the new coding format is really strict about things needing to be called out explicitly on every single page and I probably missed some. But this is an easy fix once I'm made aware of it.

Glad you're all still here with us, and we're here with us, and my city's no longer on fire, and the coronavirus... wait, that's still a thing? Goddammit.

Love, Jazz


p.s.- Oh! And you guys worked your way through the entire Least Capped Programs list, so now you're free of Drive and the Phantasm sequels. It probably helped that the Catalog wasn't working for a few days there. Regardless, be proud of yourselves. It makes me happy to be able to look at the Least Capped Programs list now and say "Yep, this shit is putrid (or poorly lit, or just generally hard to cap) and has rightfully been ignored." instead of "Wait... why is THAT there??" If new things get added that go undercapped you'll see them show up in the regular feed more often, and I've added a feature where I can pin shows to the regular feed if I think people would have fun with them. But for now the feed's back to cycling randomly through a much larger pool of programs that are 30% less likely to relentlessly follow Han around like that one Spielberg movie. Hook.