UseBB Community

As you may know, UseBB has an implementation for the DNSBL system (DNS blacklist server querying) in order to stop access from abusive hosts, such as open HTTP or SOCKS proxies. This system has worked flawlessly over the previous months, though recently a massive slowness occured while querying some servers. Especially spamhaus.org and sorbs.net suffer from delays. Therefore I suggest to carefully choose your DNSBL servers (if you use the system) and eventually test using the DNSBL test ACP module.

I also want to note (analogue to the comment in the 1.0.4 release) that no performance tests were applied to this system; to be concrete there is no index on the IP address database field, which means checking for an IP address to be in the ban list may also be a cause of slowness when creating new sessions. As a result of this (and also because often IP addresses are removed from DNSBL servers because they are no longer used for malicious activities), I advise to regularly clear the IP address bans from the database.

DELETE FROM usebb_bans WHERE ip_addr <> ''

Also, there is no cache system whatsoever that caches "innocent" IP addresses. To quote myself another time, these issues will not be fixed in UseBB 1.0.x but changes to the system will be made appropriately in UseBB 2.0.