Submitted 23 hours ago by lodion@aussie.zone to meta@aussie.zone
Seeing what appears to be a distributed scrape or AZ coming from multiple network from multiple overseas locations. From what I can tell predominantly bon English speaking countries.
I’ve had to be pretty heavy handed with the catpcha challenges for those countries for now. It seems to have helped, will keep an eye on things. Hopefully not too much collateral damage to legitimate users…
I’ve expanded the cloudflare challenges to all non Australian requests. This has made a massive impact… I’ll look at ways to relax this tonight.
For now users outside Australia will receive a cloudflare challenge in their browser. Lemmy apps will likely not function.
It looks like I’m leaving. I’m in Singapore and the site is almost unusable. Thanks for a great 2 years. It’s been a pleasure.
I’m still working to relax the restrictions… unfortunately it’s very difficult to differentiate legitimate users traffic from the bots.
How is everyone finding AZ performance for the last hour or so?
Much improved compared to earlier today. Many thanks for your work.
Way faster
Snappy on laptop and phone. Thanks!
Think it’s the same AI scraping crap everyone is getting smashed by?
Possibly. It’d be a terrible way to get that data if so. You could just spin up a Lemmy instance and federate with all of Lemmy far easier than trying to scrape all the web front-ends. Also, we try to fly under the radar from the Internet a bit. We opt out of Google searches, Amazon, Apple and GPTBot for example.
While our data is all human-generated (attractive), we’re a pretty small userbase. There are shinier web sites to scrape than us.
We’re behind Cloudflare, right? Do we have their new AI blocking features enabled?
Yes, amongst other things.
Schwenckenator@aussie.zone 5 hours ago
I’m lurking from Japan! I’m getting a challenge, but it works fine.
It probably helps that I always use the browser haha
lodion@aussie.zone 5 hours ago
Thanks for posting, good to confirm it’s working as expected.