"Anonymouse" on Disqus Pages (SOLVED)

[Sunflower]

I reported a (potential) problem with the Disqus pages about 5 p.m. PST on the main SSSS comic page.  Then I decided to report it here as well, in case A) somebody here recognizes it and B) it could be connected to the intermittent 503 connection problems some readers are having.

Sunflower
Has anyone else noticed that our Disqus comments seem to have come under the protection of Anonymouse.org? And is this something we should be worried or relieved about?

Details:
When I click on my Disqus inbox (the little circle/comment bubble next to a member's name, at top right), and view my comments/upvotes, I see the links to the underlying pages rendered this way:

http:// anonymouse .org/cgi-bin/anon-www .cgi/http://www.sssscomic. com/comic.php?page=270 [I inserted spaces in the URLs so you can see them as text more easily, and bolded the "anonymouse" part.]

The Anonymouse site itself looks harmless enough. Is it, really? I have no objections to privacy protection being injected into my Disqus if it's benign.  But its being applied unasked-for and unannounced makes me a bit suspicious.  (Says the veteran of many hours with my parents and other senior citizens, explaining about spamming and phishing.)

Thomas Cranor
O.o *worries*

Richard Weir 
It doesn't apply to all pages, only comparatively recent ones.

There is a brief review of it in an article on tomsguide.com, which compares anonymisation services:

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/se...

Victrixia 
I noticed it too, even the email notifications seem to have anonymouse-tags on them. We ought to look into this.
 
Victrixia
Okay what - I'm getting 503:Forbidden when trying to access the forum. Anyway, a couple of online sources seem to claim that anonymouse doesn't actually hide anything, so it would be at least useless.

It's a decade-old service and at least statstool lists it as 'suspicious'. Basically it seems like an ad revenue leech, not necessarily directly harmful but doesn't provide the service it says it does, and generates income through google adsense.

Victrixia 
...Anyway, 503 either means that somewhere in the forum code there's a bit that doesn't have the user rights set correctly (that tends to happen when, say, you create a website but forget to set the file rights to everyone can read ^^), OR your server is acting up.

The exact error message I keep getting is "Backend fetch failed", though that's a custom message from your server. Basically it means it's failing to access the forum database because for some reason it's decided something is access forbidden.

Sunflower  Victrixia • 29 minutes ago
Heh, not to suck you in, but we've had 503 error codes for *several* different problems, some of which are ongoing. So I'm impressed that you can actually ID what it means.

Victrixia  Sunflower • 25 minutes ago
...Also got through to the forum now! Yay.

Usually the best way to deal with this sort of issues is to contact the server space provider, there might be something going on with them. Has the forum experienced a sudden influx of new users? It might just be a bandwidth issue.
Or then their servers can't handle the amount of traffic they're getting overall and they're giving it a break by blocking more incoming traffic.

[victrixia]

continuing from the comment thread, I don't think the Anonymouse thing has anything to do with your 503 issues. The forum and the comic are hosted on completely separate servers, right? Both seem odd, though. But I'd need to look deeper into it, and since it's almost 4 am in Finland and I have one more panel of my own comic to draw, I shall leave that for tomorrow

[JoB]

Details:
When I click on my Disqus inbox (the little circle/comment bubble next to a member's name, at top right), and view my comments/upvotes, I see ...

Just sayin', I don't have the slightest what you're referring to there. I have yet to run into any unexpectedly-anonymoused link on the comic site myself. But I do see the following when I look at your Disqus profile:



Same (i.e., same page, #270) on Minnas profile ... any chance that Minna was using Anonymouse and accidentally put anonymoused links someplace (RSS feed? link to current page from homepage?) where you picked them up?

(And BTW, the reasons why men aren't cold as easily as women are threefold: a) typically more muscle mass overall (muscles are what produces heat out of nutrients in an endotherm's body); b) ~15% thicker skin; and c) no reflexes to protect the more sensitive fetus from the cold, thus not feeling uncomfortably cold so easily.)

[Koeshi]

Just checked the website, seems like a generic proxy site.  That strange URL that you are getting is simply the URL that results of viewing the site via the anonymouse proxy server.  Doubt it would be a site wide thing, more likely the result of an individual interacting with the site via proxy.

[victrixia]

Okay, now that it's actually not 3-4 am and I have my brain functioning again, I must note that I derped last night - 503 is service unavailable, not forbidden. Your theories in the other thread about 403 happening when you try to post something with spam-filtered words makes sense, I'll look into it in a moment. 503 on the other hand means that the server is put down on purpose for maintenance reasons, or because there's too much traffic, for instance.

Now, as to the anonymouse thing, it's not there anymore for today's page, but that's exactly where I was seeing that message as well, plus in my emails, so the Disqus links to the page were routed through anonymouse, probably for everyone since it was coming from Disqus. I'm starting to think JoB here has a point - it's got something to do with how Disqus fetches the site url, and if Minna gives the url to the service by hand and uses anonymouse herself, it would make sense. I don't have Disqus anywhere myself so I don't quite know how that works.