Recent content by ES Dev Team

I saw this site climb to 17k bots rapidly.. now mine's at 20k :( What i'm seeing reminds me of that anubis breakthrough - so distributed that rate limiters won't work. Generally the IPs are generally doing this or hitting what's new: This is indefensible with fail2ban isn't it. I might...

Mine spiked to 12k briefly but i saw 17k here. msnbot/bingbot is the primary source of terror for me lately

^-- i'm glad i missed those posts

Hmm, nightmare fuel for sure. That's the enormous Brazil network of hacked devices. AFAIK they are using something very close to a real browser and are more distributed than anything we've seen. It's hard to defend against and requires low level data and behavioral analysis... or just banning a...

BTW there's another issue with cloudflare. They're being forced to be intellectual property cop now too. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/11/20/japan/crime-legal/cloudflare-manga-piracy/ What's next? Well i'm motivated to work on my alternative now, ha

Something almost as bad as that is already happening. It's the right call to make the long bet that a service like this would lead to centralization and eventually a government would come along to abuse that trust. FSM-Hotline being based in the EU is worrying for free speech if they start...

Thank you and sorry to hear of the trouble!

I'm honestly a little terrified for the future of the internet when i see that so much of it has centralized on a single provider who, at the moment, seems to be slipping. Hope they get their act together because half the internet is at risk if they don't. Unfortunately my current solution...

Yeah.. i can't think of a single software today that doesn't require bolting on aftermarket software on. It's a shame, we are going to lose the indie internet over it if someone doesn't intervene. Thanks, it would be great to have some people interested in it once i've proven it out on our...

Man, i wake up in the morning and play fractional CTO to a bunch of little companies so that this doesn't happen. I can't help but be concerned when the developer team has ghosted us for 6 months now. Really hope Xenforo team doesn't keep us all in this anxiety mode much longer.

People will still want a longform format; it may look different. :)

Harsh but true. Xenforo doesn't equip users with what they need to defend their site. AI bots have raised the minimum amount of technical skill and Xenforo has not re-lowered it. But they are not alone, i don't know of a single web app that does a good job of defending itself out of the box. So...

Internet is very much alive on forums and other longform sources. It's big social media sites, which don't control for AI usage, which are going to crap. ..and nothing of value was lost

A nice backend for the admin is cool but the experience for the other 99.9% of it's users is so much more important. That's where Xenforo can kick ass if customized appropriately. It wins because it's easier to customize. AI chatbots rely on a steady stream of human produced text to remain...

Why should discussions about how to ward off bots not include other technologies?