wiki rehosted

Thanks John.

Thanks too. From what I've been reading in places like theregister.com there has been a real uptick in traffic to any and all websites, thanks to AI bots scraping anything they can find anywhere so the number of visits might not be expected to go down when the novelty wears out. I suppose there's too much faff - and expense - in protecting it with Captcha or Cloudflare but it would be nice if there were some more.. well.. DIY way of keeping the bots out.

During the recent worldwide surge in coding job applications from disguised North Koreans, a particularly successful way of weeding them out at interview stage was to ask the question: How fat is Kim Jong Un? The line would inevitably go dead at that stage because if the interviewee dared to continue they would inevitably go dead themselves.

So what questions could uk.d-i-y pose to weed out the bots? How demented is Elon? Is Sam an Alien? Is Sundar Picha his real name? Is Tim Cook a reskinned Steve Jobs? Surely there must be one good question to out them all?

Nick

Maybe ask chatGPT about canoes?

That should get them mouthing at the foam! ;-)

Chris

Yes, thanks for that John

ha - good story!

J^n

There's this:

(the bots pushed my small wiki offline by repeatedly overwhelming the tiny server it was on)

Theo

Thank you John.

Not looked recently but thanks also for your helpful input over the years.

Have the URLs changed?

Google is handing out

ok we can probably fix that - the latter version is what mediwiki expects, the former one worked due to a bit of web server slight of hand by it automatically re-writing the first form of URL into the form that mediawiki wants.

Many thanks for setting up and maintaining the Wiki, and for all your contributions to this NG - they are all very much appreciated.

How is the Wiki hosting funded? Is it costing you real money?

ok try it again now...

Previously it was running on a 123-reg shared hosting package that we already had to run some of our own sites. So that was in effect a free ride for it. However performance on that was flagging (mostly due to extra load from bot and ai crawlers I expect).

So we also have a Virtual Private Server that we use to run applications for a client (including a wiki of their own). We needed to replace that since it was running CENTOS (a now unsupported non commercial variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

So we have spun up another VPS running a supported distro for their workload (which they pay for), and decided to top up the difference to rent a VPS somewhat better than what would actually be necessary just to run their apps, so we have some spare capacity for the DIY wiki.

So now it is a "mostly, but not quite" free ride :-)