Description
Forovanta Sentinel gives forum administrators control over suspicious traffic through an integrated security dashboard. Monitor activity, manage trusted and blocked addresses, set request limits, and apply temporary blocks—all from your Forovanta admin area.

Start in Monitor mode to review activity without interrupting visitors. When you’re ready, switch to Enforce mode to reject requests that match your blocking rules or exceed your configured limits. Optional repeat-offender protection applies longer temporary blocks after separate blocking episodes, without treating repeated refreshes as new offenses.

Sentinel includes an IP whitelist, address-level reports, searchable security events and recovery controls to help you investigate problems and adjust protection.

Features

• Three protection modes: Off, Monitor and Enforce.
• IP whitelist: Display your forum-resolved IP and add trusted IPv4, IPv6 or CIDR rules.
• Address blocking: Block individual addresses or network ranges. Trusted rules take precedence.
• Configurable request limits: Set the request allowance, counting window and temporary-block duration.
• Manual temporary blocks: Block an address for 10 seconds to 30 days, with controls to release it early.
• Repeat-offender escalation: Apply longer temporary blocks after a configurable number of separate block episodes.
• Security dashboard: Access Sentinel through Admin → System → Security.
• Flagged-request analytics: Review 24-hour, seven-day and 30-day reports, including the top ten flagged addresses.
• Address inspection: See recorded reasons, matching rules, episode history, block expiry and current request-window counts.
• Searchable records: Filter security events, repeat offenders and temporary blocks.
• CSV export: Export filtered security events for further review.
• Recovery controls: Clear individual blocks, reset episode history or use a file-based recovery bypass.
• Optional exemptions: Configure signed-in member and loopback exemptions.
• Optional rule caching: Use private file caching or available APCu, with database fallback.
• Retention controls: Configure event retention and clean expired records.
• Visitor block pages: Clear 403/429 responses with retry information and optional support links.

Compatibility and release note
For the Forovanta Installer edition with Sentinel’s core integration, introduced in beta.152r. Requires a valid licence. Currently a development beta; live MySQL concurrency and browser-layout validation remain pending.

VPN/proxy detection, CAPTCHA challenges, country/ASN filtering, verified crawler detection and threat notifications are not included yet. Sentinel is application-level protection, not network-level DDoS protection.