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SCAM WARNING! See how this scam works in Classifieds.
“Oops! We ran into some problems.”
- Thread starter old-fart
- Start date
RustyOldNail
SEARCH for the treasure...
Been happening several times a day, site will not load, I come back later and often site loads fine. I’m using Safari on an iPad, and have not changed my internet settings.
BeltedCoyote
Well-Known Member
Yeah. Just had that not 5 minutes ago. Seems to happen daily, although I personally haven't noticed a pattern to the timing of the events.
This is caused by an internal table oveflow when we get swamped by bots. IP blocks have been put in place to alleviate the problem but of course the bots eventually switch to new IPs. It is a struggle that has been affecting many forums, not just ours.
BeltedCoyote
Well-Known Member
Makes sense. Thanks for doing what you do Pak
Bakin4Life
Oink
I see the cause is known; my question is about funding. How is this site funded? I've never seen a 'donate' page, etc., and I know web hosting costs money. Does the site owner(s) pay for the whole ride themselves? (if so, we owe them a debt of gratitude).
(mods: if this is confidential, don't answer here; just curiosity, on my part. Thx)
All the time. Very unstable site.
The banner
We are experiencing temporary outages. Keep trying, it does recover. We hope to rectify this as soon as possible.
seems to be a permanent fixture at this point.
www.technologyreview.com
The banner
We are experiencing temporary outages. Keep trying, it does recover. We hope to rectify this as soon as possible.
seems to be a permanent fixture at this point.
Maybe cloudflare can help?
Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites
The company will also introduce a "pay-per-crawl" system to give users more fine-grained control over how AI companies can access their sites.
Numerous_Nothing
Well-Known Member
Same results here. I’m on another forum that sometimes has the same problem, due to the same problem (bots), but not as frequently.
RustyOldNail
SEARCH for the treasure...
This amount of disruption is fairly recent, within the past week. Haven’t seen this on other forums. Just now I couldn’t log in for over an hour. Hopefully something can be done to fix this.
666Honeybadger
Unknown member
The forum is owned by @vtac but he has been absent for some time. Initially it was funded by a limited group of sponsors but I am not sure if that is still the case.
All the time. Very unstable site.
The banner
We are experiencing temporary outages. Keep trying, it does recover. We hope to rectify this as soon as possible.
seems to be a permanent fixture at this point.
Maybe cloudflare can help?
Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites
The company will also introduce a "pay-per-crawl" system to give users more fine-grained control over how AI companies can access their sites.
Other sites have gotten some relief from Cloudflare but it by no means a complete solution. While I said @vtac has been absent, I am in contact with him and he has implemented some blocking. I don't think it was Cloudflare.
4.562 guests?
Does this mean there's over 4.000 bots browsing/occupying this site?
Yes. Blame AI.
RustyOldNail
SEARCH for the treasure...
2:15 pm EST.
After a full hour, finally able to view site. It’s getting out of control, as site is getting to be unusable.
After a full hour, finally able to view site. It’s getting out of control, as site is getting to be unusable.
TigoleBitties
Big and Bouncy
Right now the guests are down to 116 although they were over 5000 a few minutes ago. Wondering if the IP blockers do a sweep every so often? 
RustyOldNail
SEARCH for the treasure...
You could look into using Cloudflare. Even their free offering does almost everything they can do.
bellona0544
Well-Known Member
Cloudflare Is One of the Companies That Quietly Powers the Internet. Researchers Say It's a Haven for Misinformation
Cloudflare—and other companies like it—are turning a blind eye to hate and misinformation, critics and researchers say
Why Cloudflare Sucks: An In-Depth Look At The Perils Of An Internet Giant - ExpertBeacon
Cloudflare has positioned itself as an essential part of the Internet‘s infrastructure, offering content delivery, security, and performance services
expertbeacon.com
From the second link:
"Matthew Prince, Cloudflare‘s CEO, has openly admitted "a valid court order could force us to do things we may not want to" such as secretly hand user data over to government agencies. Prince also described Cloudflare‘s supposed obligation to keep 8chan online in 2019 as "arbitrary," highlighting how little users can depend on Cloudflare to protect their privacy or speech.
This lack of transparency is a big problem for the over 25 million Internet properties that sit behind Cloudflare. It‘s impossible to know what Cloudflare might be monitoring, recording, or sharing about your website and visitors."
Considering weed is still federally illegal and the Heritage Foundation wants to re-energize the prohibition against it, Cloudflare is not a company I am particularly interested in supporting. They will both sponsor hate sites and might turn over our data to feds.
Cloudflare Is One of the Companies That Quietly Powers the Internet. Researchers Say It's a Haven for Misinformation
Cloudflare—and other companies like it—are turning a blind eye to hate and misinformation, critics and researchers saytime.com
Why Cloudflare Sucks: An In-Depth Look At The Perils Of An Internet Giant - ExpertBeacon
Cloudflare has positioned itself as an essential part of the Internet‘s infrastructure, offering content delivery, security, and performance services
From the second link:
"Matthew Prince, Cloudflare‘s CEO, has openly admitted "a valid court order could force us to do things we may not want to" such as secretly hand user data over to government agencies. Prince also described Cloudflare‘s supposed obligation to keep 8chan online in 2019 as "arbitrary," highlighting how little users can depend on Cloudflare to protect their privacy or speech.
This lack of transparency is a big problem for the over 25 million Internet properties that sit behind Cloudflare. It‘s impossible to know what might be monitoring, recording, or sharing about your website and visitors."
Considering weed is still federally illegal and the Heritage Foundation wants to re-energize the prohibition against it, Cloudflare is not a company I am particularly interested in supporting. They will both sponsor hate sites and might turn over our data to feds.
Your first link is from three years ago - August 2022 - and is about Kiwi Farms (a stalker platform) using Cloudflare services. At the beginning of Sept 2022, Cloudflare blocked them and redirected site visitors to this post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
Cloudflare terminated services for 8chan in 2019. Here is their post about it: https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/
So bravo for Cloudflare - this is a company I am happy to support.
bellona0544
Well-Known Member
They hosted Kiwi Farms for years before blocking them. Allowing Nazi websites like the Daily Stormer to exist even after all of the other major internet backend providers stopped doing business is bad. Only finally distancing yourself from Nazis when the Nazis start claiming that your company is actually run by Nazis is pretty bad. Cloudflare has consistently shown that they care more about a nebulous concept of "free speech" than trying to do anything on their own platform to deplatform hate groups, and they only take action after significant amounts of online vitriol are heaped at them and it starts to affect their bottom line.
Inside Cloudflare's Decision to Let an Extremist Stronghold Burn
The story of how an internet infrastructure company get locked into a free-speech dispute starts in the cubicles of SoMa and the brothels of Istanbul.
Please read that, and tell me that the CEO understands what he is doing. He appears to believe that his service is akin to phone lines, and that if AT&T were listening to calls and then kicked customers off their platform, that would be creepy. What he fails to understand is that if AT&T got a new customer that was a full-on Nazi organization, AT&T has a moral obligation to deny them services. If the Nazis want their own services, they can build their own. There is no free speech issue in someone who has created a service deciding to deplatform certain ideologies from that service, because Cloudflare is not the internet and is only one of several possible providers. The basis of the free market is the ability for market participants to regulate themselves, and Cloudflare believed at least until 2017 that they were not required to regulate themselves because they were building "infrastructure" and that infrastructure should be able to be accessed by anyone. What they forgot is that unlike roads, literally anyone could build a site that blocks unwanted traffic, and so they have NO obligation to provide that "infrastructure" since they have no monopoly on the infrastructure (or, at least, they shouldn't under neoliberal capitalism which explicitly works to prevent illegal monopolies).
No. An organization run by a rich Ivy League asshole who thinks that Nazis are fine on his platform until they claim he is a Nazi is not a good organization. It is not one that has a foundation of care built in, and frankly, anyone who thinks that Cloudflare won't immediately turn over the data on this very site to feds if feds asked is a fuckin' idiot. Cloudflare explicitly confirmed they WOULD turn over data to the government, so the whole "free speech" thing is a facade anyway since they don't actually protect the speech they claim to protect.
They'll let you say the most heinous shit imaginable and their platform will protect you, and then they'll turn around and sell you out to feds. Oh, but they might terminate you if there is enough publicity. Until then, you can keep being a Nazi and they'll protect you from DDoS attacks so you can be as loud a Nazi as you want.