Nicker on 31/7/2025 at 00:50
Hello,
Since this morning (July 30, 2025) the forum has been asking for verification that I am human before tasking me to the site. It seems to happen each time I pop in.
As far as I know I haven't changed anything on my end. Is this the new standard?
Thanks for any info.
Niker
Aja on 31/7/2025 at 04:11
The site was apparently getting hammered by bots, and I assume this is the solution.
WingedKagouti on 31/7/2025 at 09:10
Probably a combination of scammers, bots looking for vulnerable servers and LLM trawlers. It has been a growing issue online for many years, and many of the places I visit have found that solutions like this are required to keep operating.
Dia on 31/7/2025 at 15:20
Whatever it takes to keep out the scammers & bots.:thumb::thumb:
Twist on 31/7/2025 at 17:36
I've used CloudFlare like this for client websites, and it is unquestionably an enormous boon to small, independent publishers of all sorts, especially during the AI boom.
I know CF isn't a perfect company, but the accessibility and effectiveness of the services they provide for free are incredible.
TTLG admins will probably tune the security down after a while (it's really quick and easy to do). To raise it to the point where everyone gets bot checks this often means something was happening. Once whatever's happening passes, they can tune it down while maintaining security and performance without it being such a nuisance to regular users.
Al_B on 31/7/2025 at 18:12
Absolutely right on all points.
I'd put a message about it on the facebook group when it was pretty much impossible to use the site. The traffic patterns have changed enormously recently and it's just not simple to do simple IP blocking any more. Thousands of "user" sessions were being created by automated bots - most of which looked to be related to AI or similar from many different sources.
Cloudflare has been added at a basic level which helps cut that down a little. It also allows us to turn on the human verification when things get bad and it's been very effective at restoring service. It's not something we want to have on all the time as it can hurt indexing by genuine services but it's better than being offline. Currently it's a manual option but one that we may look to automate so it only kicks in when really needed.
WingedKagouti on 31/7/2025 at 21:32
Quote Posted by Twist
TTLG admins will probably tune the security down after a while (it's really quick and easy to do). To raise it to the point where everyone gets bot checks this often means something was happening. Once whatever's happening passes, they can tune it down while maintaining security and performance without it being such a nuisance to regular users.
I want to believe that the various bots will eventually give up, but it's relatively easy and cheap to set up something that just shotguns every IP it can find. Especially with distributed botnets leeching off processing power and bandwidth from unsuspecting people. Expect this to be a long term thing.
john9818a on 22/8/2025 at 22:53
I was getting 503 errors when trying to access TTLG, so its good that there is a way to combat the bots.
R Soul on 23/8/2025 at 09:22
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
taffernicus on 24/8/2025 at 09:45
Quote Posted by R Soul
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
this would be a good template question to verify whether someone is human or not
