Hi MD friends! Nothing fancy to report, just wanted to address the site uptime issues which have been on and off for some time.

It looks like we're being DDoS'd, either by AI scraper bots or people who just want to watch the world burn. Most AI scrapers are blocked by Cloudflare (kept a few open for search indexing) but we have also enabled “Under Attack mode” at times, which requires a captcha prompt and prevents the remote encoders for WMDpro from working. This isn't ideal, but it is better than being knocked offline.

The server VM is pretty beefy (and expensive!) so I don't think just throwing more resources at it will solve the problem long term. I will take some time to analyze some PHP and web server settings, plus Andreas the Dokuwiki lead developer has just announced a new bot protection system on his Patreon that I'm eager to implement (Dokuwiki itself is quite lightweight, but the big databases we host take a lot of computing power)

We're not going anywhere and if the site is down or running poorly please hang tight and it should be up again shortly once the attack pauses and/or the server is rebooted. If needed, the site is cached on the Internet Archive.

Hope to return soon with good news. Until then, take care!