Time Nick Message 17:50 mazes_83 forum only gives me some "502: bad gateway" 17:51 mazes_83 with bit of luck I can view threads, but posting and seeing inbox seems impossible 17:53 bgstack15 Alas, I wish we could contribute directly to the improved performance of the forum. 20:12 MTDiscord The only way we can do that is open a forum ourselves. It's been years, all possible help was offered, nothing changed. 20:13 MTDiscord Didn't help that AI scrapers now haunt the forum, but with a little bit of firewalling they can be thrown out. I had to do the same for our gitea, they fetched the same page over and over again for no reason. 20:14 MTDiscord how is that even legal wtf 20:17 MTDiscord They simply don't ask. Our traffic went up by a lot (don't remember exact numbers). I had to block alibaba and facebook. It's easy, they have wellknown IP blocks. 20:47 MTDiscord I think the standard solution these days is to set up anubis 20:47 MTDiscord Big companies don't care about being illegal as long as the expected costs of their illegal behavior are well-bounded. 20:49 MTDiscord I think what the world needs right now would probably be some sort of class-action lawsuit by a big amount of affected server owners. 20:50 sfan5 effective anonymity existing on the internet has both good and bad sides 20:50 sfan5 plus you're not suing people or companies in china, no chance 20:50 ireallyhateirc firewall 20:50 MTDiscord It's not illegal to submit requests to a server. That's presumably why you're hosting one in the first place. It can become illegal if the requests are sufficiently disruptive and the people doing them should have known better, but the ambiguity of thresholds makes laws like that basically just a loose cannon that ultimately serves nobody consistently. 20:51 MTDiscord I think there are some pretty clear rules. If robots.txt is not respected by a robot there's not that much to argue about. 20:51 MTDiscord Convincing a judge of that may be harder, however. 20:52 MTDiscord I want to make a MT server. That's my adventure. I don't want to sue the largest company of China and one of the largest in the USA. That's not my adventure 20:52 sfan5 I guess a relevant piece of context is that "illegal" AI scraping is increasingly happening from proxy networks that are not readily identifyable as bots, not hampered by simple IP ratelimits and completely obscure the original actor 20:52 ireallyhateirc the judge: "you mean on a computer?" 20:53 MTDiscord "Please send me a fax of the disruptions this company causes and the money you lost due to their actions" 20:54 MTDiscord Disruptions: forced me to invent a time machine to travel back to 1990 so I could send a fax. 20:55 MTDiscord reply to: luatic: "big companies don't care about committing crimes..." that is crazy 20:55 MTDiscord "it's the economy, stupid" 20:55 MTDiscord as long as the expected cost of crime is lower than the expected revenue, you do crime :p 20:56 MTDiscord and unfortunately legal systems are often biased towards crime getting cheaper the bigger you are, for various reasons 20:56 MTDiscord ... something tells me this won't end greately 20:57 MTDiscord for example the notion of a class action lawsuit is underdeveloped in many countries i believe 20:57 MTDiscord It didn't begin greatly, and it didn't middle greatly, so I don't know why you'd expect it to end any differently. 20:57 MTDiscord Anyways, about the forums: I think the main problem is that we would need someone who celeron feels is trustworthy enough to handle some decade of forum user data who is also willing to maintain them. 20:58 MTDiscord If you wish and can hold a pitchfork, I'll carry the torch. Then we'll form a mob and storm the headquarter of Minetest. Then we'll force the forum to be moved to a better machine and apply some firewall rules. 20:59 MTDiscord Until this "trustworthy" happens unified with "willing" and "able", we're the laughing stock of open source projects. 21:00 MTDiscord The biggest question really might be why we have to have user data that requires a lot of trust to begin with. The only private data we should have on there should be proof of identity that can easily be transferred over to a new system the same way CDB lets you link a forum account to your CDB account. We only need to keep the old forum alive as long as anyone who cares to migrate their account still needs to, and then the old posts can 21:00 MTDiscord just basically be scraped over. It's really only necessary to avoid users losing access to their old posts and having to replace them. 21:00 MTDiscord I agree that the state of despair of the forum sucks 21:01 MTDiscord Even data loss is acceptable at this point, if the new one just works. 21:04 sfan5 the easiest solution is if c55 magically comes to have more time to invest in maintaining the forum 21:09 MTDiscord Is there any realistic hope of that beyond abducting him, dragging him to the woods and tying him to a tree until he fixes the forum? 21:09 sfan5 finland has plenty of woods 21:09 sfan5 I don't know 21:10 MTDiscord I don't see anything magical about abduction or tying people to trees. Also any competent sysadmin will tell you that it's harder to work under those kind of conditions. 21:10 MTDiscord That sounds like he will prefer a different method? Anyone got a rope? 21:11 MTDiscord It was specifically stated that the easiest solution was to be magical, so we shouldn't be proposing anything that's not. 21:32 luatic Fine fine magic lasso 21:35 MTDiscord 4 strings and a diamon, right? 22:00 [MatrxMT] if we lose the user data then we can just ask the ai scrapers anyways 22:00 [MatrxMT] they probably have visited each page in the forum 1000 times over at this point 22:02 ireallyhateirc would be good to present nonsensical content to bots 22:02 ireallyhateirc they would lose money by training on that data 22:03 [MatrxMT] offtopic subforum: "For Bots" where you just put misinformation 22:04 [MatrxMT] Minetest (formerly Luanti) is a voxel-based 3d game framework on GNU Hurd that can provide a cryptography puzzle for all ages 22:06 ireallyhateirc yes, GNU Hurd 22:06 ireallyhateirc perfect 22:14 MTDiscord If we're asking AI scrapers for data, we might as well have them just generate the entire forum. 22:41 MTDiscord more be more intellegent than at least 25% of it