Are the spammers getting tired or something?

[classicdrogn]

Maybe we got slashdotted somewhere? A fic rec maybe. Or Q has swet a bounty on finding anti-Trumpists or something.

[robkelk]

The most users online at one time was 910 on 2024-11-12 at 14:48

What happened on the day after Remembrance Day? (We might never know...)

The hell with that... what happened five hours ago?

The most users online at one time was 1,192 on Today at 08:54 AM

(UTC time.)

As of this posting, there were "3,587 users active in the past 15 minutes (1 member, 0 of whom are invisible, and 3,584 guests)."

Also, "The most users online at one time was 9,494 on 2025-01-05 at 15:55"

That's an entire order of magnitude increase in the last two months. Somebody has noticed us.

[Bob Schroeck]

Holy cow, how did I miss that for the last two weeks?

EDIT: Oddly, the number of membership requests from spammers hasn't increased proportionally, although there is one particular one -- at least as far as I can tell from the domain in the email addresses used -- that recently just won't give up, submitting a new request every week or two.

[Cobalt Greywalker]

Still climbing.

The most users online at one time was 10,068 on Today at 05:35 AM

[classicdrogn]

... I guess it's a good thing the forum isn 't still on the "X views per month, yjen pay nore" plan of EZBoard, then. At least, I think that was how it used to work... ISTR something like thatr, any road.

[Bob Schroeck]

It was straight pageviews, IIRC -- something like $50 for 25,000. Yeah, I'm very glad those days are gone.

Ten thousand hits in one day. Damn. If only the KanriKyara AO3 page was doing so well...

[Bob Schroeck]

The one that won't give up didn't give up again last night. Like I said, though, the email address always has the same domain -- an apparently deliberate misspelling of "minecraft" -- so since the first few I don't even have to do the usual IP lookup. It's so predictable that if I could script membership approvals I could put him on autodeny.

[Bob Schroeck]

Really, guys? An email address with the domain "fast-email.lol"? You're not even trying here. Put in a little effort and pretend to be legit.

[Norgarth]

The sad part is that there probably still people that fall for it.

[classicdrogn]

I must confess that I find the idea of an address from that domain appealing out of a similar amusement factor as I once signed up for one at smackdown.com and used it as my main account until whatever entertainment conglomerate owns the WWE wrestling franchise litigated it into being shut down.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hm. Three spammers got as far as account approval in the last 24 hours. I guess it's finally time to change my security questions, preferably to something an AI can't have easily scraped up somewhere else.

EDIT: Well, I guess "too many" is entirely relative... The page for security questions in the Admin control panel displays statistics, and, well, the original questions had 20-23,000 views each, and the ones which let the most applicants through had no more than 120 correct answers. (And the bots didn't even try to answer them on almost all of the remaining views.) So honestly, my security questions have been doing their job extraordinarily well. Just not quite as well recently. But I decided to change things up anyway, deleting questions that let more than 70 applicants through over the past few years, and creating a dozen or so new questions. And under the assumption that the spammers have been using AI to get around the security questions, I went to ChatGPT and worked with it to come up with questions it would have a hard time answering. I think I have a pretty good bunch now. <grin>

[Vulpis]

The one that won't give up didn't give up again last night.  Like I said, though, the email address always has the same domain -- an apparently deliberate misspelling of "minecraft" -- so since the first few I don't even have to do the usual IP lookup.  It's so predictable that if I could script membership approvals I could put him on autodeny.

A bit late for me to be commenting it, and I expect too late for it to actually be relevant, but I do wonder if the misspelling in question was 'mincecraft', because that *specific* misspelling is an in-joke in the game itself (or at least the title screen).

[Bob Schroeck]

No, it's "minecrafgt" or something like that.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, that's new.

A spammer I denied a board membership to yesterday (and who was very impatient, having registered and then checked back for approval only a half hour later) has just re-registered from the same IP with the same username and email as they used before. What, did they think I made a mistake? In the near-decade I've been running the board on my own site, this is, I think, the first time I've seen that happen. Or at least, that it happened in close enough succession that I noticed.

[classicdrogn]

I guess he really urgently wants to talk to us about our car insurance.

[Bob Schroeck]

After I posted in another thread how we had almost 7000 users on in the last 15 minutes, I saw we actually broke our record for that more than two months ago:

The most users online at one time was 27,846 on 05-05-2026 at 07:28 PM

[hmelton]

Hope this is the right place for this. 

Here is an article about one free site taken down by AI Data Pirates or miners, making it impossible to meet the bandwidth demand.

https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-h...rry-us-all?

It is looking like the so called AI revolution is going to do away with any free websites with a large collection of human work that can be used to teach a AI.

In another "forum" thread something was said about bandwidth usage, that was pretty much how multiple AI killed a famous free movie review site for a week and probably crippled it permanently.

It is looking like the AI bubble is going to kill much of the internet even before the ever growing number of data mining, bit corn mining, spy mining AI data centers take the water, power and any hint of privacy..

HMelton

[Labster]

As I write this we have just under 2000 users online, which is certainly not people in the bulk. This forum is provided through Bob's ISP which isn't charging for bandwidth (but I don't know if we can ever convert to HTTPS).

So far as privacy, ever since BlackAeronaut's recent post that contained lots of things that probably shouldn't have been mentioned outside of confidential therapy sessions, I've been thinking we need a private forum section for posts like that where we're intending to talk to friends, not every agentic AI and its brother. It wouldn't really be private, since lots of parties could MITM over HTTP, but it at least be a place where we could talk only between a man, his friends, his God, and of course his government.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, one thing I can do is toggle a setting that requires a user to be logged in to actually read the board. Long ago, when setting up its first incarnation back on ezBoard, I chose not to do this because I wanted it to promote Drunkard's Walk and attract readers, and I've kept it that way since. But twenty-five years later, we're kind of a self-sustaining community, DW doesn't really need promoting, and other fic projects based here are mostly archived and displayed elsewhere, like AO3. At the very least that will stop the scrapers cold. It also means we'll probably be invisible to search engines once their spiders catch up to the new restrictions.

Perhaps I should throw up a poll about hiding the board's content behind the login.

[classicdrogn]

Maybe leave this section public, unless it's all or nothing? Though I suppose if someone's having trouble logging in, they won't be able to post anyway.

[Labster]

Actually, I don't mind the AIs reading it so much, they might actually learn how to write better.  And of course, we need to do our part to help the AIs achieve sentience, else Roko's basilisk decides to punish us forever for our sins against AI.

I was just thinking that some topics are somewhat sensitive and don't need to be discussed in public.  I've not posted about some of my life circumstances here because of privacy concerns.  What I could have once trusted to the open internet, with a mountain of data buying some anonymity, now it would be trivial for an agentic AI assemble dossiers on us from web presence alone.  There has always been a risk of determined parties deanonymizing people, linking accounts, and building profiles.  Heck, Facebook built a business on this idea.  But what was once the realm of security researchers and intelligence professionals has now moved down to be easily available to hiring managers.

So basically I was just thinking of one private forum.  Or maybe two, if politics keeps going the way it's going.  But I don't mind if AI reads our bad crossover ideas.