As you’ve seen if you’ve tried, Cloudflare is having a system conniption:
This affects IFDB, IFWiki, IFComp, IF Archive, and the Twine server. Not the forum though!
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Background: we’ve had the IF Archive on Cloudflare for a long time, since that gets hit for large files all the time.
In the past year we’ve moved a lot of other services to Cloudflare – mostly on the free plan – because Cloudflare can effectively handle the load caused by AI-training scraper bots. (See my blog post.)
Smaller sites like https://spagmag.org and https://inform-fiction.org don’t get the heavy AI bot traffic as the other sites. Even though they’re on exactly the same back-end servers. I don’t know whether this is a function of popularity or page count or what. So they haven’t been set up for Cloudflare, and are therefore unaffected by this outage.
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This is also affecting itch.io (and by extension Ectocomp). Fingers crossed it’s resolved soon!
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Yes i saw it. But is there a good reason for using Cloudflare in the first place?
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Well, if you dig into the situation, you’ll find that Cloudflare can effectively handle the load caused by AI-training scraper bots.
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As a data point: back in September, twinery.org started suffering regular timeouts due to load. It was a static site at that point. (Chris had already converted the old questions section from PHP to static HTML.) We set up Cloudflare on Sept 22, and it’s been fine ever since.
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