Email Revalidation Required - System Login Changes Coming

[Brett_Tabke]

We are working on the login/registration routines for the board over the next month:

Some updates will require you to:

1. Revalidate your email address. Please check your email as listed on your profile.
   
2. Pass codes: Login will use "email me a passcode code" format to login.
   
3. Passwords will be eliminated. A recovery email address will be added.
   
4. Cookies will be required to view the forums
   
5. Javascript will be required to view the forums
   
6. CloudFlare will be tested
   
7. Anyone viewing more than 10,000 pages per month and not a senior member, will be required to subscribe.
   

This is all in response to abusive behavior by some bots, people, and users.

I just finished looking at the logs for August and there 95 million - yes 95 million - page views. That is clearly impacting system performance and making the board almost unusable for actual users at times.

I have always tried to get the system wide open for users to peruse how they choose, but the situation has become untenable and I feel I have to aggressively address it.

[explorador]

Yeah, bots... and now with AI, so much garbage around.

BTW, there is another forum I sometimes visited (in spanish), it used to have very decent traffic, but now is not the same anymore. Cloudfare was implemented, then random waits telling you the resources couldn't be accessed (for you) at the moment), and now it has a weird and boring 2 stage captcha, yes, 2 stage that even resolved correctly sometimes denies the resources to the visitor.

[lucy24]

having being blocked under their original UAs in robots.txt

? A robot that honors robots.txt is not a robot that I will lose much sleep over.

[Brett_Tabke]

We turned on the JS requirement today.

[graeme_p]

@Brett I am curious about whether the JS requirement helps. I would have guessed that the worst of the scrapers will be well funded and therefore will have the resources to run JS. Its just a bit more memory and a bit more compute required and its pretty much a requirement for large scale scraping these days anyway.

[Brett_Tabke]

oh ya, it is the most successful thing I've done yet. There are massive bot nets running on amazon and those are old school bots that don't support js.