Thanks to main work by Leo Lapworth and Olaf Alders at the Perl Toolchain Summit, we now have a setup that allows us to move the site behind a CDN ( https://www.fastly.com/ in fact ). Fastly does not require magic Javascript to execute on the clients, but will ideally still help to stem the deluge of scrapers. Together with this, there will be some likely changes:

The site will only be available under perlmonks.org. The other domains will issue HTTP redirects to that address. This means that you will have to check the hostnames in your tools and in your browsers. Using the hostnames to differentiate between user profiles will not work anymore.

The site pages will be cached for Anonymous Monk. We'll start out with a cache duration of 1 hour but will likely increase this. Fastly has an API, so maybe busting the cache for recently updated threads is possible. If you are polling Perlmonks without a login, you will likely see a more static response.

The timeline to move the site behind Fastly is to do it is likely in the next two to four weeks, depending on the availablility of myself and others.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Moving the site behind a CDN
by hippo (Archbishop) on Apr 26, 2026 at 10:42 UTC

    Very glad to hear that a potential solution is imminent and also that it doesn't involve Cloudflare.

    I'm still point-blank refusing to use any LLM-powered AI since the blame for this lies entirely with them. Please consider doing the same.


    🦛

Re: Moving the site behind a CDN
by roho (Bishop) on Apr 26, 2026 at 11:44 UTC
    Thank you Co-Rion and anyone else involved in stemming the tide of these AI scrapers. They have done inestimable damage to this site by slowing it to a crawl (or a complete standstill), thus causing countless users to abandon it because they cannot wait minutes between responses. I hope that once this is implemented the steady flow of users will return.
    P.S. It took 15 to 20 minutes just to enter this reply.

    "It's not how hard you work, it's how much you get done."