#meta 2025-08-14

2025-08-14 UTC
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[snarfed] sure!
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kaja.sknebel.net edited /User:Kaja.sknebel.net/upcoming-hwcs (-10) "update from events.indieweb.org" (view diff)
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[aciccarello] I think it's going to be hard to move those conversations to a separate channel with how often people bring it up nowadays.
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capjamesg aaronpk I'm seeing MediaWiki internal error.
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capjamesg Original exception: [5e466c18da3d3121e35fab45] /coffee Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBConnectionError: Cannot access the database: Connection refused (127.0.0.1) on the wiki
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IWDiscord <c​apjamesg>
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IWDiscord <c​apjamesg>
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capjamesg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/866577502586273792/1405480129391624274/Screenshot_2025-08-14_at_10.16.06.png?ex=689efadf&is=689da95f&hm=b77d82328022ad83cfc625749ba6d763f8287a95f3a2925369650a2364fe9625&
[Murray]1, [tantek]2, [artlung]1, [mattl]2, [aciccarello]1, [Jo]1, [KevinMarks]1, [social]1, [morganm]1, [Jim_Mitchell]1, [snarfed]1, IWSlackGateway4, [schmarty]2 and [Ana_R] joined the channel
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[Ana_R] me too btw
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[Jo] Oh yeah its on everythinf but the homepage, including the css
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[Jo] https://events.indieweb.org/ has a database error as well
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[artlung] !tell aaronpk database connection error issues occurring on http://indieweb.org sites
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Loqi Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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aaronpk Yikes
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Loqi aaronpk: [artlung] left you a message 20 minutes ago: database connection error issues occurring on http://indieweb.org sites
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aaronpk I blame the AI scrapers
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kaja.sknebel.net edited /User:Kaja.sknebel.net/upcoming-hwcs () "(-529) update from events.indieweb.org" (view diff)
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kaja.sknebel.net edited /Template:next-hwc (+0) "update next date from events.indieweb.org" (view diff)
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aaronpk It's frustrating because it's not like web crawling is new, but clearly these companies are doing it in the most lazy way possible and just hammering websites
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bjoern.stierand.org uploaded /Special:Log/upload "uploaded "[[File:hwc-nuremberg-2025-08.jpg]]" https://indieweb.org/File:hwc-nuremberg-2025-08.jpg"
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bjoern.stierand.org created /events/2025-08-13-hwc-nuremberg (+2138) "added event" (view diff)
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aaronpk i'm gonna move indieweb.org to cloudflare tho, this has happened too often now
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doesnm aaronpk: very bad choice
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aaronpk well it's either that or the site keeps going down
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doesnm maybe at least you can disable ECH?
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aaronpk what does that have to do with anything?
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doesnm Encrypted Client Hello
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aaronpk what effect would that have on crawlers?
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doesnm not on crawlers, but it enabled by default on Cloudflare
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doesnm it helps hide hostnames in TLS but someone don't like it and block all sites with ECH
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aaronpk i thought the whole point was to increase privacy by not sending the hostname unencrypted. why is it bad?
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doesnm aaronpk: yeah, but also it prevents blocking websites by SNI.
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aaronpk blocking by who?
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doesnm by RKN and others
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aaronpk isn't preventing blocking good?
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doesnm aaronpk: again, they don't like it https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417
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[aaronpk] uhoh, slack bridge is down, hold please
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aaronpk yay it's back
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aaronpk weird, apparently i got part of the way through moving the slack gateway to a new server in february but never finished
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aaronpk ok well let me know if you see anything weird for the next few hours
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aaronpk should be a relatively seamless transition if i did this right
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doesnm seems migration are complete
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doesnm https://s.h4ks.com/B9K.png
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aaronpk where is the ECH setting? I can't fint it
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doesnm gui setting are only on prem plans. But it's possible to disable via curl https://s.h4ks.com/B9L/p
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[mattl]2 What’s the issue with ECH?
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doesnm [mattl]2: i'm posted link to github above
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[mattl]2 Yeah I don’t see where it actually says the issue, only that they’re blocking it.
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capjamesg !archive https://events.indieweb.org/2025/08/homebrew-website-club-eastern-svj0umndcvjH
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capjamesg [edit] !archive https://events.indieweb.org/2025/08/homebrew-website-club-eastern-svj0umndcvjH
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cali-iwc Created https://indieweb.org/events/2025-08-13-hwc-eastern. Please review the page to ensure the document is correctly formatted and remove any unnecessary text.
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cali.moe created /events/2025-08-13-hwc-eastern (+4254) "Created event page using IndieWeb events / Etherpad archiver" (view diff)
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jamesg.blog edited /events/2025-08-13-hwc-eastern (-215) "Archive dto" (view diff)
sp1ff, barnaby, gregsarjeant, sebsel, lanodan, GWG, doesnm, ramsey, jjuran, opencircuit, voxpelli, ben, claudinec, Tiffany, Saige_Leah, aaronpk, vikanezrimaya, _123nick[d], dissolve22[d], BigShip59, Lars-Christian, cali-iwc and Saige_Leah[d] joined the channel
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aaronpk doesnm: I turned ech off
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aaronpk i still want to find a way to prevent logged-out access to the wiki history pages, those are where a lot of the bots are crawling
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aaronpk oh there might be a plugin for this
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aaronpk wait i already did that?
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aaronpk well cool
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aaronpk ok this is nuts, the wiki is getting hammered by crawlers
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capjamesg aaronpk Is it the same 1-2 crawlers or a lot of different ones?
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aaronpk impossible to tell
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aaronpk as a comparison, oauth.net gets about 6k pageviews per day, indieweb.org gets 1k according to the Fathom analytics
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aaronpk but oauth.net serves 50mb/hour of traffic, but indieweb.org is at 700mb/hour
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capjamesg 😮
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aaronpk so the vast majority is crawlers not triggering the JS analytics
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paperbritt I've just seen a few more indieweb adjacent people complaining about massive amounts of bots over the last week. There's definitely something going round (I've decided to talk about it like the common cold).
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aaronpk like there is no way this is a legitimate user agent string `Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU iPad OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/532.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) FxiOS/15.8d7234.0 Mobile/87M420 Safari/532.1`
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aaronpk that was a request for a history page of a 2020 IWC demo page
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aaronpk the IP address is from an alibaba network
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paperbritt That is exactly what mine look like, a list of almost random possible browsers, nothing identifiable. IP addresses from Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, then after blocking most of those Brazil and Vietnam appeared. It looks like a mix of cloud services and random unrelated sources.
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aaronpk :sigh:
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[mattl]2 Isn’t that the user agent for iOS Firefox?
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aaronpk sure but iOS firefox should not be running in aliexpress
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aaronpk alibaba*
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[mattl]2 VPN/proxy or a bot? I’ve not seen anyone faking that one before.
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[mattl]2 If you want to share the IP address I can check my list of proxies