goldlush
10-30-2016, 11:22 PM
P99 Auctions is Closing
Dear Traders,
It’s with a heavy heart that we announce the end of the P99 Auction House. Beginning on September 28th our data processing services started being hammered by enormous amounts of irrelevant data (enormous for us at least). After a bit of investigation we came to the conclusion that someone had reverse engineered our web services and setup a bot to flood the servers with useless data. Not a terribly difficult thing to do considering our client application is free, open source and fully commented. Anyone with a computer science background could accomplish this task in about an hour’s worth of work. To give you an idea of the volume, our daily, in-bound traffic has gone from about 1-2gb of text data a day (from our contributors uploading their auction lines) to 75gb a day in the last month. It’s quite an amazing amount of text if I’m being honest. The servers check for a properly formatted auction and perform de-dups so the data is completely discarded but it’s a strain on the servers nonetheless. We try to block an IP, they switch to a new VPN, we ban their transmitted client id, they just change it. The spam largely occurs during the European day and prime times. It doesn’t happen all the time or every day. You’ve likely encountered the effects if you watch the live feed during the day (US time), it simply does not connect. In the background we’ve lost significant amount of legitimate data as a result of contributors not being unable to connect as well.
You’re probably asking yourselves, but this happens all the time to other websites and they don’t shut down, what gives?
Well, basically, we’re a small (0-2 persons), completely voluntary, non-revenue generating operation. As those of your who've watched the p99 subreddit know, things have been incredibly busy IRL. We've not had any time to publish the alerts update as it is, then this started. Its pulled our attention in the wrong direction and, if I’m being honest, is not a lot of fun. We like building features that help people; not doing background stuff because some asshat wants to send useless data through our servers. You could argue that it comes with the territory and it’s something we should have been willing to deal with or planned better for. You’re probably right. We could sit here and try to raise money, hoping we get enough to afford some appliances or services to combat the problem while we watch our hosting costs go up. We could try some more defensive coding strategies and hope the spammers give up as well...but, this is an elf sim, not a job. We've put way to much time into p99auctions to walk away but there is a point where you have to stop and make some choices. Do we continue down the path of turning recreation into a non-paying, part-time job or get back to “having fun”. We've chosen the latter. It's been amazing watching the site grow from 5-10 users a week to well over 2000 unique users a day. It’s a shame that things ended this way, I’d rather p99auctions have died because someone else built something better. Maybe now someone will do just that and move the bar forward on their own.
Whats Next? Effective immediately the auction feed is dead. If you run the auction assistant, go ahead and delete it. The site itself will be up for another week or two to allow searching on recent auctions. After that, it will be brought down and a form of this message will appear instead. P99auctions.com will stop resolving altogether in one month. For those of you who had accounts registered, your data along with your email addresses will be destroyed when the site shuts down.
Cheers and Best Wishes,
P99 Auctions Community Team
Dear Traders,
It’s with a heavy heart that we announce the end of the P99 Auction House. Beginning on September 28th our data processing services started being hammered by enormous amounts of irrelevant data (enormous for us at least). After a bit of investigation we came to the conclusion that someone had reverse engineered our web services and setup a bot to flood the servers with useless data. Not a terribly difficult thing to do considering our client application is free, open source and fully commented. Anyone with a computer science background could accomplish this task in about an hour’s worth of work. To give you an idea of the volume, our daily, in-bound traffic has gone from about 1-2gb of text data a day (from our contributors uploading their auction lines) to 75gb a day in the last month. It’s quite an amazing amount of text if I’m being honest. The servers check for a properly formatted auction and perform de-dups so the data is completely discarded but it’s a strain on the servers nonetheless. We try to block an IP, they switch to a new VPN, we ban their transmitted client id, they just change it. The spam largely occurs during the European day and prime times. It doesn’t happen all the time or every day. You’ve likely encountered the effects if you watch the live feed during the day (US time), it simply does not connect. In the background we’ve lost significant amount of legitimate data as a result of contributors not being unable to connect as well.
You’re probably asking yourselves, but this happens all the time to other websites and they don’t shut down, what gives?
Well, basically, we’re a small (0-2 persons), completely voluntary, non-revenue generating operation. As those of your who've watched the p99 subreddit know, things have been incredibly busy IRL. We've not had any time to publish the alerts update as it is, then this started. Its pulled our attention in the wrong direction and, if I’m being honest, is not a lot of fun. We like building features that help people; not doing background stuff because some asshat wants to send useless data through our servers. You could argue that it comes with the territory and it’s something we should have been willing to deal with or planned better for. You’re probably right. We could sit here and try to raise money, hoping we get enough to afford some appliances or services to combat the problem while we watch our hosting costs go up. We could try some more defensive coding strategies and hope the spammers give up as well...but, this is an elf sim, not a job. We've put way to much time into p99auctions to walk away but there is a point where you have to stop and make some choices. Do we continue down the path of turning recreation into a non-paying, part-time job or get back to “having fun”. We've chosen the latter. It's been amazing watching the site grow from 5-10 users a week to well over 2000 unique users a day. It’s a shame that things ended this way, I’d rather p99auctions have died because someone else built something better. Maybe now someone will do just that and move the bar forward on their own.
Whats Next? Effective immediately the auction feed is dead. If you run the auction assistant, go ahead and delete it. The site itself will be up for another week or two to allow searching on recent auctions. After that, it will be brought down and a form of this message will appear instead. P99auctions.com will stop resolving altogether in one month. For those of you who had accounts registered, your data along with your email addresses will be destroyed when the site shuts down.
Cheers and Best Wishes,
P99 Auctions Community Team