Pair have investigated the recent outage and the site was hogged by Amazon AIbot by them keeping all connections to Apache open.

The IPs have now been blocked on the firewall and I will be far more aggressive now by blocking IP addresses of anything hitting the site in an undue fashion.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: The recent outage
by marto (Cardinal) on Sep 13, 2024 at 06:55 UTC

    Many thanks!

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Re: The recent outage
by marto (Cardinal) on Sep 16, 2024 at 06:52 UTC

    I'm curious as to the scope of recent changes. Since this announcement the site has responded (for me at lest) better than it has in years.

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      There were no big changes. Some bad actors (identifying as bots) have been blocked by their IP address, and I've marked some more links as "rel"="nofollow" in the hope that good actors won't hammer the site for little to no information gain. This is mostly for the print view and showing spoilers.

      I'm thinking of changing the spoilers to be entirely client side by using the <details><summary>Reveal Spoiler</summary> Here is the hidden content</details> tag - it seems to be fairly well supported.

      Testing this:

      Reveal SpoilerThis is a spoiler that has been hidden.

      The changes for this would be mostly made in ParseLinksInContent, replacing the link spoiler style with something that renders <details><summary>Reveal</summary>...</details>, and in Display Settings, changing the link spoiler style to details.

      I'm for removing the link spoiler style alltogether, as modern (enough) user agents render it well enough. Revealing all spoilers can also be implemented in Javascript easily if needed.

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[d/l]
[select]
        FWIW, that "spoiler" worked in Firefox v115.15.0esr/Windows (sans Javascript).
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Re: The recent outage
by harangzsolt33 (Deacon) on Sep 13, 2024 at 12:09 UTC
    Why does Amazon have a bot? I thought they were an online shopping center, not a search engine. Why do they have to crawl the web?
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      If you think Amazon is just an online shop your knowledge is decades out of date.

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[reply]
        If you think Amazon is just an online shop your knowledge is decades out of date.

        That might be true. But I honestly don't understand why Amazon is trying to copy the PerlMonks website. Are they looking for their competitor who is selling monkfruits for less or what? lol

[reply]
      All big (and smaller) players are investing in data hungry LLMs and offering chat interfaces.

      Just ask Alexa ;)

      They are also afraid to miss an immanent technological revolution.

      Nokia might tell a story about that.

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      see Wikisyntax for the Monastery

[reply]

        itym immanent eschatological revolution

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