#meta 2025-08-30

2025-08-30 UTC
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osteophage.neocities.org edited /small_web (+272) "adding Small Web September at tantek's prompting" (view diff)
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petermolnar morning; the indieweb.org wiki throws 401 on search when searching unauthenticated - I'm guessing that's on purpose, but is this mentioned that it's on purposed somewhere?
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capjamesg petermolnar We had a huge influx of AI traffic that was trying to crawl the revision history of every page 😭 The root path of the revision history is the same as the search feature.
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capjamesg I'm not sure if it's documented on the wiki somewhere.
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capjamesg There will be logs of the discussion in the meta channel.
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capjamesg The block was put in place some time this month.
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doesnm also migration to Cloudflare
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petermolnar I thought it was something like this behind it
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petermolnar not good to hear this :(
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[artlung] Yes that search block is at the nginx level and I’m not sure if there’s a fix planned but aaronpk put the intervention in place.
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aaronpk yeah let me see if i can unblock search
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aaronpk hey i think that worked
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aaronpk i'm sure this is horribly inefficient nginx config, but pretty sure it's still less CPU than actually serving the whole page to the crawlers
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petermolnar nginx is still in C, the inefficiency of that thing is negligable
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petermolnar I know the "if-is-evil" thing but I'm resorting to that to block "good" AI scrapers that identify themselves as AI
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petermolnar the newest thing that started to hit me out of the blue is a "security scanner": https://www.onlyscans.com/about
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[artlung] aaronpk, I'm not seeing that it worked. getting 401 Authorization Required nginx/1.24.0 for this url when loading in a private window. https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1&search=obsidian
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aaronpk hm, let me tweak the regex
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aaronpk apparently there are a lot of different ways search URLs can look
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aaronpk ok should work now
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[artlung] That works. One thing about an error page a missing page is it gives this interesting message: "There is currently no text in this page. You can https://indieweb.org/Special:Search/error in other pages, or https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=error, but you do not have permission to create this page."
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[artlung] I don't think "search the related logs" is something that needs to be anon-accessible. But feels like that error text could be different.
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aaronpk not sure i understand
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[artlung] sorry! for a page like this, when not logged in: https://indieweb.org/zzyzx That error text contains a link to _*"search the related logs"*_ and I am wondering it that capability actually needs to be exposed.
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aaronpk oh huh, I don't know if I can change that message
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aaronpk yeah i'm not seeing it in the list of system messages
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[artlung] it's all good. you've done the good thing a few people have mentioned as a problem - you made search work for non-logged in users
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capjamesg aaronpk++
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Loqi aaronpk has 38 karma in this channel over the last year (111 in all channels)
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[tantek] aaronpk++ for search for all
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Loqi aaronpk has 39 karma in this channel over the last year (112 in all channels)
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patsitive.co.nz edited /chat-names (+140) "/* M-R */ added self" (view diff)
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Loqi [Jo] has 9 karma in this channel over the last year (52 in all channels)
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[tantek] [Jo]++ once again for https://indieweb.org/File:hwc_flyer_vhs_style.png which is a great inspiration
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[tantek] btw related to the VHS styling discussion, I believe some of the "color bands" designs of VHS tapes were based on broader 1980s (maybe even late 1970s) design trends, e.g. I remember first seeing that kind of bright color bands design in the Atari VCS/2600 video game Breakout (here's the box cover: https://lirp.cdn-website.com/52756d52/dms3rep/multi/opt/Breakout-2600-480w.jpg )
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[tantek] (via https://www.classicarcademuseum.org/breakout )
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[tantek] ^ note the credits there and then the fact that color bands showed up in the Apple Computer logo subsequently
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[tantek] Here's what the game looked like, recreated in SVG: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2b/Breakout2600.svg
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[tantek] Y U NO PREVIEW SVG SLACK
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tantek.com OR DISCORD for that matter
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[tantek] fine here's a 1024w PNG of that SVG: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2b/Breakout2600.svg/1024px-Breakout2600.svg.png
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islandstone. https://indieweb.org/this-week-in-the-indieweb
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IWDiscord <i​slandstone.>
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islandstone. This is the URL to the page where I'm having trouble signing up for the newsletter.
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aaronpk weird, i wonder what changed
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[tantek] interesting, right there in the embedded form on the page. can you try it with Firefox and see if you get a similar error
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aaronpk i add a link to a signup form hosted on mailchimp, that should always work
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[tantek] yeah that's a good fallback
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aaronparecki.com edited /this-week-in-the-indieweb (+61) (view diff)
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islandstone. [tantek]: Same behaviour in Firefox.
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[tantek] sigh, that's too bad
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[tantek] lol aaronpk that mailchimp sign-up page requires no less than FOUR javascripts. for a single text field form field with a single button. what a joke
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islandstone. Mailchimp page worked, so I'm in 😅👍 thanks for the fast reply, guys.
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aaronpk 😂
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[tantek] really appreciate the bug report islandstone_[d]++
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Loqi islandstone_[d] has 1 karma over the last year
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islandstone. [tantek]: Glad to help 🙂