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+--- Forum: Fenspace (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=12)
+--- Thread: Website Notice 10/27/2025 (/showthread.php?tid=14932)
Website Notice 10/27/2025 - M Fnord - 10-27-2025
Hey gang, yeah I know it's been a while & we're mostly dormant but this is important.
I just got an email from our webmaster. Apparently LLM scrapers have been attacking fenspace.net with great ferocity, lots of bots hitting the site with 5 requests/sec.
(Given that there were like 30+ "Guests" watching the subforum when I started this post, I suspect they're here too.)
As the site owner I've authorized him to set up a bot-protection system that ought to keep the content-stealing techbro plagiarism gremlins at bay. That said, there is a catch; it'll effectively switch the site over to HTTPS, and that might - might - break some image links, templates etc.
So we're going to do this thing because frankly all of those goat molesters can go catch a bus with their teeth. But if you go look at FenWiki at any point and see something broken please let me know here. I will do my best to make sure FenWiki is working correctly.
--Mal
RE: Website Notice 10/27/2025 - Bob Schroeck - 10-27-2025
Thanks, Mal. I know I haven't been anywhere near active in Fenspace in years, but knowing the wiki is still there has always been a kind of creative comfort to me.
As for our "guests"... the forums have been targeted by thousands of bots for years, long before there were LLMs to scrape for -- the spammers have been trying like nuts to get in ever since I moved the boards to my site. The advent of the AIs hasn't significantly changed the amount of traffic that hits us.
RE: Website Notice 10/27/2025 - M Fnord - 10-27-2025
Quick update: webmaster's deployed anti-bot defenses and it looks like it's slowing down the scrapers without compromising any of the site content. (I'm looking into whether or not redirecting the scrapers to goatse is feasible.) That said, I'll probably be doing a MediaWiki version upgrade in the next couple of weeks for general security purposes.
All is... I won't say "well" but we are holding up against the techbros for now.