I've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now. They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say they had to do this because the increase in bot traffic was slowing down the site so much it was costing them money: https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=562415
I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).
It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.
I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.
> Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years.
Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have caused resource usage to more than double.
The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud providers who have provided added services that you might not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum" might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most investigated regulars only.
Holy hell, I can't believe NationStates is still kicking, or that Firefox has managed to hold onto my login details for 20 years. Truly a more innocent age that we'll never be able to return to.
I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is very, very slow (dead).
It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1 bots:humans) but it is not a problem.
I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing their websites just because they "feel" they have to block them. They actually don't.