On 2026-01-20, Jeffrey Walton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 3:53 PM Greg Wooledge <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 15:35:10 -0500, Davidson wrote: >> > Why not >> > >> > 402 Payment Required >> > >> > instead, with instructions on how pay for the privilege of getting on >> > a whitelist? >> >> For one thing, I know they're never going to pay me. >> >> For another, I'm not doing this because I hate AI or whatever. I'm >> doing it for *survival*. The host that my wiki runs on *cannot* >> process those thousands of useless dynamic page requests. If I were >> to say "hey, pay me X dollars, and you can send as many page diff >> requests as you want", I would be making a promise of services I cannot >> deliver. > > ++. > > The Crypto++ project got kicked off of GoDaddy hosting because of > virtual CPU usage. Our CPU usage would also affect co-located sites. > That's when GoDaddy stepped in and closed us down. > > We tracked it back to bots hitting our wiki and trying to make > anonymous edits. The bots would try to make edits, and that would > spin-up that useless Wiki Editor from Wikimedia. The edit would > eventually fail (during Save) because the bot was not authenticated. > I seem to recall we were seeing between 3 and 7 edits per second from > bots. > > The bots were also causing boatloads of OOM kills on our VM because > the wiki editor was so heavy-weight. We had to constantly repair our > SQL database because Linux was killing the MySQL instance. > > Eventually we had to move to Hostinger hosting.
How did that solve the problem (I'm ignorant)? The thing is with these big or little but soon to big and overvalued on the Dow Jones or whatever it is companies, you can't just call them on the phone and ask them to be reasonable. I'm not even sure they control or understand exactly what these robots are doing. I think they're already out of control and on the loose, as it were. > Jeff > >
