bot posts

Some German bot(s) seemed to take interest in one of Cogneato's sites, Rockin Houston. The aging site is fairly inefficient with a lot of data, and the bot was causing high load on our DB server. I have implemented a PHP blocker for certain IPs, but I wanted something more broadly applicable. I made a rate limiting rule on Cloudflare that should block this type of behavior and prevent it from even hitting our server once the rule triggers.

Some presumed bots figured out the reCaptcha (version 2) we protect forms with at Cogneato. Continue reading post "reCaptcha solved by bots?"

Recently, one of Cogneato's client's site donate form was submitted thousands of times, presumably to fraudulently test credit card numbers. Continue reading post "#2907"

I had to manually force renew the TLS certificate for my site (the thing that makes it encrypted over HTTPS) because of a bug in LetsEncrypt's software. Continue reading post "#2674"

I use Letsencrypt with certbot for the HTTPS certificates of my personal sites. I use the certonly method to allow full control over my server configuration. This means specifying one or more web-roots for each certificate. Continue reading post "Letsencrypt: Shared verification web-root for all domains"