freeorion.org inaccessible about freeorion HOT 7 CLOSED

The site appears to be back up again...

from freeorion.

Apparently some script running on the site was using too many server resources and they disabled the whole website directory. The site has been running nothing but phpBB and MediaWiki for years, so I'm not sure what the issue was. I am currently waiting for more info...

from freeorion.

The hosting provider says a bot was attempting to crawl the site to train a language model. Since we use Cloudflare to protect against traffic spikes (after one took down the site and lead to a $1000 hosting bill in 2019) the host couldn't block the bot by IP, and thus took down the whole site to prevent it from affecting anything else hosted on the same server. We apparently need to do something in the Cloudflare account to prevent this. The appropriate person has been informed.

from freeorion.

Maybe related, if not already done: robot.txt to disallow the scrapping bots
https://neil-clarke.com/block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-by-scraping-your-website/

from freeorion.

Good thing it wasn't some security breach.

from freeorion.

Since the website and forums are still down, a brief notification here: this weeks test builds are available at sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freeorion/files/FreeOrion/Test/

from freeorion.

A rule to block "ClaudeBot" has been added to CloudFlare. I've replied to the issue on the site host informing them of this.

from freeorion.