Heads up: you might see a quick “are you a bot?” page on lemmy.radio now
You may notice a short page that says “Making sure you’re not a bot!” (with a little jackal) when you first visit lemmy.radio. It only lasts about a second, then you’re in. Here’s why it’s there.
The problem: lemmy.radio has been getting swamped by AI scraper bots: automated programs pretending to be real people, loading old posts thousands of times a second to harvest data. It was overloading the site and causing the errors and slowness a lot of you have seen lately.
The fix: I added a free, open-source tool called Anubis that acts like a bouncer at the door. When you arrive, it gives your browser a tiny puzzle to solve… think of it like rolling dice until you hit the right number. Your computer does it automatically in about a second, and then it remembers you for about a week so you won’t see it again for a while.
It’s easy for a real visitor but a nightmare for the bots: they’d have to solve that puzzle millions of times over, which is too slow and expensive to bother with. So real people get in, and the bots get turned away.
What you need to know:
- You might see the page on your first visit (or about once a week). Totally normal, just let it finish.
- Keep JavaScript on for it to work.
- Apps and other Lemmy servers aren’t affected, this only checks web browsers.
Sorry for the recent hiccups. Things should be much smoother now. Maybe even faster!
As always, please let me know if this causes any issues…
73,
w0odl