Altar of Stone Forums - Update Thread

[Daedalus]

30/01/2024 - Updated forum software to phpBB 3.3.11. Please notify me if you discover any breakages in functionality on the forum.

[Daedalus]

You might've noticed that Altar of Stone has recently had an enormous increase in its guest traffic. No, we are not suddenly hugely popular. Rather, this is an issue that is currently plaguing a large amount of forums that run on phpBB, and we are not exempt. It looks to be the work of "AI" operating out of China that is scraping the Internet for whatever information it can. The operation responsible for it has unfortunately made the "guests" operate in a particularly obnoxious and invasive way, that naturally doesn't respect the rules of the "Western" Internet. That's not to say that "Western" corporate AI is in any way more ethical. It's pretty much all awful, but some "Western" bots are a bit more courteous in identifying themselves.

At this time the issue doesn't appear to be worsening, and the site is able to handle a lot more traffic than these bots are creating, so it shouldn't impact anyone's experience. Unfortunately, all the solutions I've found to date are either very heavy-handed, or slightly go against my vision for the site, specifically with regards to it being as "independent" as I can reasonably make it. Also, although I suspect there are only about three Blood fans in China, I don't want to resort to making blanket restrictions that prohibit 80% of the world from accessing the site. Within reason, I don't want to punish entire regions for the behaviour of these bots.

All this is to say that I'm aware of the issue, and the biggest risk it poses is that the AI might reconstitute something posted on this forum in Traditional Chinese. I have not yet found a solution which I am happy with. For now, I am hoping that the operation running this shifts its focus or runs out of funding. Until then, I will continue to keep an eye on it and take further steps if it gets worse. The only real harm done at this point is that the view count on threads on the forum are horribly inflated, and in no way reflect anything close to real activity on the site, which is a pity, but that's the state of the modern Internet for you.

I believe that the phpBB developers are going to be taking steps in future updates that'll structure the forum behind the scenes in ways that are a little less attractive for these types of bots to navigate. It's not a perfect solution, since they'll still be finding the site and creating fake 'hits' behind the scenes, but it should hopefully reduce their ability to navigate things.

All this aside, some exciting changes and updates are coming "soon". I'll share more on that in the coming months.