mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

AO3 PowerShell PSA

Jan. 28th, 2026 05:31 pm
estirose: Masumi against a red and black background (Black and Red - Boukenger)
[personal profile] estirose
There's a nasty bot going around telling authors in a comment to run a Windows PowerShell command to "make sure your IP is on the safe list" as "AO3 is going to block thousands of IP addresses". AO3 is doing no such thing! It actually is meant to panic authors (who use Windows) into running a malicious command designed to permanently delete everything in their Documents folder.

Here's the command broken down, and what it does:
Get-ChildItem: This is telling it to essentially list an entire directory.
-Path "$env:USERPROFILE\Documents\": This lets Get-ChildItem know that you want it to list your Documents directory.
-Exclude *.archiveofourown: This is put in to make you think you're reaching out to AO3. In reality, it's just telling it to exclude all files with the file extension *.archiveofourown (that is, files ending with .archiveofourown). Chances are you do not have any files named that.
-Recurse: do this for everything in the directory, including all subfolders and everything in them
|: take what you've got so far and use it with the following instruction(s).
Remove-Item: delete files/folders.
-Force: Permanently delete, no retrieving from recycle bin.

So to put it together: "List this entire directory, not including anything with the file extension .archiveofourown; we want to look at all subdirectories and files as well. Take this listing and delete everything permanently." And needless to say, your computer will do this without asking you if you are sure!

The big thing to take away from this is Never, ever run a command you don't understand!

ModDrop PSA

Jan. 24th, 2026 05:32 pm
estirose: The PC farmer stands face to face with Maru in a wedding dress. (Marrying Maru (Stardew Valley))
[personal profile] estirose
This was shared in the Stardew Valley official Discord, apparently you should be very cautious in downloading from ModDrop and stick to NexusMods for Stardew Valley mods. Apparently there's nobody moderating ModDrop and therefore stolen and/or malicious mods are getting uploaded there.

I do have a mod on there (Raven's Mystery Box Exchanger), it is not being deleted from there and I'm not uploading it on Nexus, mostly because I uploaded it there for a grand total of one person to be able to grab it easily - having other players grab it was nice but far from critical, and I don't take offense at people being warned from downloading from there. I will also be the first person to tell you that you need to be careful of any executables where they're not expected (bat, exe, sh) and be cautious of .dll files (to a lesser extent - be aware there are plenty of benign community mods with .dll files!).

(I really do need to get into my github and update it with all my freaking mods! But that's for another day.)

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