the_mad_poster's Journal: Stupid Subnet Banning Crap Malda Freaking....

So, I'm banned at home too. Obviously, there's no way around the 1337 coding skills of the The Pudgy Malda, so here's what I"m gonna do. Because I hate having to wade through proxy lists trying to find working proxies that also work on Slashdot, I'm gonna build me a little scripty dip to get around subnet bans with minimal hassle. It will work as such. Similar to Sexual Asspussy's shitstorm.pl script, you will put your information in a text file on your filesystem somewhere. The format will be as such:

User:your_username
sid:SID_to_post_comment_to
cid:CID_to_post_as_reply_to
proxies:see_below
MSG:blah balh your meassage goes here until EOF

The proxies line will be either a list of potentially working proxies or a list of URLs where the pages contains a list of potentially working proxies. The system will sweep the proxies to make sure they're up before trying to post to Slashdot. Then, the remaining potential proxies will be used to try and post your reply. Once a working proxy is found, it will be saved to another known good list and that list will be tapped before trying to use new proxies.

Known bad proxies can optionally be ignored in the future depending on whether they failed to respond at all, or only failed to work on Slashdot.

I'll try and keep it as light as possible so I can distribute it to people in a standalone package who don't have Perl installed and don't want to bother doing so. That way, if folks like Sol get swept up in a subnet ban they can still use this script without having to do any UNIX-y stuff or install anything.

Why would I do this? Because banning on entire subnets does not work. It HEAVILY penalizes up to 252 people for the bad actions of 1 (or, if you've misconfigured your network badly enough, 254 people for the bad actions of 1). On subnets that involve dial-up users, it could potentially ban several hundreds more than that because of on rotten apple. That, combined with the fact that they still allow anonymous posting and don't really respond to requests to "help track 'them' down" when someone emails the management, means that there's just no way this current system can do what it's supposed to. On top of that, you can't stop real trollers like that. They post things that appear to be legit until it's too late. The only thing you can try to do is ID crapflooders, but to ban them effectively, they're going to have to fix their captcha system for registration and ban AC posting altogether.

In effect, this will be a fix for a broken feature of slashdot. Think of it as an unsanctioned patch to a major bug in Slash.

Update: does anyone here who knows python want to mangle the pystorm.py script rkz pointed out? I don't do Python and don't particularly care to install Python on my system either (nor do I care to have to SSH over to the FreeBSD box everytime I want to post through a ban on Slashdot). I'm still planning on going forward with the modifications to shitstorm.pl for this since it's not really meant to flood anything.