4 issues i discovered after getting customers | entrance web page

2023-03-13 02:15:06

final month, i posted about my web site basement community on hacker information and it sorta blew up. you possibly can view the post here. it blew up a lot, i used to be completely unprepared for what got here with all that visitors, so with out additional ado, listed below are 4 issues i discovered operating an internet site with principally user-generated content material:

1. somebody goes to abuse your web site

this one might sound fairly apparent. you’ll have heard about XSS attacks or perhaps even tales of individuals brute forcing their way into production servers however what i am speaking about is an assault that you simply may not even take into account when operating a social media web site: dumb-ass individuals being actually obnoxious

when the positioning first bought a surge of customers from hacker information, there was one poster particularly who got here to the positioning, registered a bunch of offensive, racist usernames and proceeded to put up and create threads that had been simply filled with dumb slurs. this was undoubtedly a studying expertise as a result of i needed to act rapidly, so i attempted a bunch of various strategies to do away with him.

i banned his account
- this solely labored momentarily. his account was banned, however nothing stopped him from from registering a very new account and persevering with to put up racist shit
i blocked his IP handle
- this labored for a bit of bit longer, however he proceeded to get on a VPN, after which one other when i blocked that IP, then one other when i blocked that IP, and many others, and many others.
i added a web site setting to show off registrations fully
- this was an excellent band-aid resolution, however it wasn’t nice. i wished to capitalize on the visitors that was nonetheless coming in, so i later allowed individuals to register, however flagged their account as “unapproved.” then by hand, i went and manually accredited every account i assumed was legit.
i created a denylist for usernames
- this characteristic got here a lot later, however one of many final issues i did to mitigate any extra abuse was to create a denylist of phrases so that folks could not register racist or offensive usernames

2. you want a efficiency monitoring system

this additionally might appear to be a no brainer, however when hacker information ran the visitors up on basement neighborhood, the positioning didn’t deal with the load nicely and that i had virtually zero perception into what was going incorrect. are the SQL queries too costly? was the primary doc taking too lengthy to load? is there an excessive amount of JavaScript operating? i do not know. that is why very shortly after seeing the visitors, i applied Sentry into each my front-end and back-end code so i can get a full image on the place the issues lie, which results in my subsequent level

3. your SQL queries should be optimized

after getting some logs to work with, i observed virtually immediately that plenty of efficiency points had been stemming from the truth that i had manner too many SQL queries operating to show a easy web page. that is principally as a result of i relied on a SQL ORM which briefly is a device that makes writing SQL simpler to select up and quicker to develop. the largest draw back is that it would execute 50 queries to your database to get a listing of knowledge, when it in all probability solely wants 1, which can trigger slowdown.

this was clearly an issue and i’ve been tackling it in piecemeal – optimizing every web page at a time. because the preliminary rush of visitors, i am happy to say that the load instances for the positioning have gotten a lot better.

4. your customers might need genius concepts

lastly, the final notice i am going to make right here is about listening to suggestions. since launching the positioning, some customers have urged fairly good options that i’ve since applied, like this back-to-top button to rapidly get again to the highest of the web page: