UK/EU dominance in PM.net

MarkSturtevant · Post by **MarkSturtevant** » Fri May 17, 2019 11:29 am

Assuming that it is true that the EU/UK members are dominant in the numbers of posts and comments here, it may be for one or both of these reasons.
1. It could be that there are a small number of people who are highly frequent posters and commenters, and by pure chance more than half of them happen to be from the EU/UK. The would skew the appearance.
2. The traditional naturalist hobbies, like birding and botany, may be more popular in the EU/UK than say the U.S. That would not surprise me at all. And if so, then it could translate to a difference in other hobbies like the ones on display here.

Adalbert · Post by **Adalbert** » Fri May 17, 2019 1:48 pm

Hello everybody,
I’m from the EU and I would like that UK belongs to EU :-)
Concerning the activity in the forum I only can say that it is dependent on the IP-addresses of the user.
99.99% of my attempts to reach the forum are not successful because of my ip-address

So, I think that that the US-guys (working for the big companies) cannot reach the forum because of the infrastructure reasons.
BR, ADi

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Fri May 17, 2019 4:01 pm

99.99% of my attempts to reach the forum are not successful because of my ip-address Sad

I don't understand - ??

Chris S. · Post by **Chris S.** » Fri May 17, 2019 11:27 pm

Adelbert, I'm with ChrisR in not understanding your issue. Also, I'd like us to resolve it if possible. Can you tell us more about what is going on?

We occasionally ban IP addresses that send abusive Web crawlers against us. By "abusive," I mean irresponsible Web crawlers that demand so much of our resources that ordinary forum users have trouble getting in. More responsible Web crawlers, such as Google's, provide tools that let the admin team set crawlers' demands to a level that does not bog down our Website, while keeping Google searches up to date on our content.

Among the worst Web crawlers have appeared to be security response crawlers for private industry. In my view of this kind of event, a forum member, acting in good faith, checks the forum from work. But at work, people in data security have configured a Webcrawler set to suddenly and rapidly crawl all over any site queried by anyone in their network. These corporate crawlers are no doubt looking for malware and other evils--and as far as this goal is concerned, I sympathize with their mission. The problem is that this scanning is often not well-planned and slows or shuts us down. These bots often try repeatedly to read or send private messages, or do other things that guest users are not permitted to do. Typically, there is no published method for working with this group of system administrators to help them check our site without shutting us down.

--Chris S.

rolsen · Post by **rolsen** » Sat May 18, 2019 3:19 am

Only thing I can imagine is the restrictions of the workplace's Internet usage, one may have limited access to Internet because of company's IT-policy.

Adalbert · Post by **Adalbert** » Sat May 18, 2019 3:33 am

Hi Chris & Chris,
If I try to reach the forum (during the lunch break, of course) I usually get the following response:
“You have been banned from this forum”
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... highlight=
At home I don’t have this problem.
BR, ADi

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Sat May 18, 2019 7:06 am

Try https://www.bbc.co.uk/ from your workplace?

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat May 18, 2019 10:41 am

Adalbert wrote:If I try to reach the forum (during the lunch break, of course) I usually get the following response:
“You have been banned from this forum”

This behavior is consistent with the issue & handling described by Chris S.

I suggest determining what your external IP address is at work, using something like https://whatismyipaddress.com/.

Then let us know what IP address it is, so we can check to see if it is on the ban list and consider removing the ban.

--Rik

iconoclastica · Post by **iconoclastica** » Sun May 19, 2019 9:54 am

Chris S. wrote:Ever since you raised this question, I've been pondering how to find an answer to it. A significant job of ad hoc database analysis could work, but would require more hours than anyone would likely care to perform.

Scanning the log files and resolving the ip adresses is not hard to do. When I set up my first server in the mid 90-ies already the software was freely available. Much harder is phrasing the actual question you want to answer.

Reading back, I can't make out whether the interest is in readers, posters, or members (there is some introgression between the groups).

The big question that puzzles me is: What choices for location should we list?

If it's countries you are interested in, there are (ISO-)lists of countries that many registration sites use. One could add an 'other, specify' for the odd popup country that's not in those lists.

One other thing that troubles me is: I notice that quite a number of users have not specified their country and/or location. Is that deliberate and should we allow them this anonymity, or not?

MarkSturtevant · Post by **MarkSturtevant** » Sun May 19, 2019 5:41 pm

One other thing that troubles me is: I notice that quite a number of users have not specified their country and/or location. Is that deliberate and should we allow them this anonymity, or not?

That is true. I just now updated my profile to approximate my location. There are times when knowing someones' location would be helpful, as in having an idea about where to look to ID a species they have posted.