P99 wiki constantly down

[druidbob]

What has been the deal with the wiki lately? Seems like every other day I go on there to check something only to get "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties." It would crash every now and then in the past but it was never this bad before.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Bots have been saturating the forums and wiki for a while now. While I don't think the explicit purpose is to DDoS the forums/wiki, that ends up being the effect. My guess is AI tools training on web data and bad actors trying to inject ads into the wiki/forums. That has happened before.

You can use the wayback machine for now. I doubt too much has changed on the wiki.

[Ciderpress]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Ciderpress [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

There's much more incentive to assault the wiki. Let's say you're selling penis pills: you have some spammy penis pill website that Google won't touch.

But if a lot of respected sites link to your penis pill site, some of their respectability rubs off on your site, and it starts ranking higher on Google ... which means more $$$ for you.

Now, the truth is, Google isn't dumb, so getting your penis pill site on our wiki will do either nothing or almost nothing ... but this approach used to work, and maybe still does, a little. Spammers either do it for the tiny bit it helps, or because they don't follow SEO and don't realize it doesn't work

Meanwhile, a random link or two in a forum post has even less chance of improving page rank. Some spammers still try it, but most don't bother.

[OriginalContentGuy]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Spammers either do it for the tiny bit it helps, or because they don't follow SEO and don't realize it doesn't work

Clearly the wording of someone trying to keep the penis gains to himself.

[Reiwa]

Originally Posted by Ciderpress [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

Forums do get slow when they're actively scraping.

I think they maybe have gotten it all by now?

[CrazyPro]

It's because of a horribly implemented pigparse feature that scrapes the wiki every single time someone targets a mob.

[Jimjam]

Where is our Masked crusader with an abundance of trannyporn? Only they can save us by making the forums and wiki a black-listed area for bots to trawl!!

[plonkster]

Putting the whole p99 bunch of websites behind the free Cloudflare plan would probably fix the issue.

It takes 15 minutes to set up and I'm willing to help if the admins lack the experience working with Cloudflare.