It has been a constant battle to keep the bots away. You've probably seen several threads like this over the last few years.
After thinking about it in the shower (where I do some of my best thinking), I realized I was not employing a forward-looking strategy to get rid of them, but rather just playing whack-a-mole. I decided to model their behavior. I noticed several behaviors which humans have almost never done here in the 14 years this site has existed, yet bots do all the time.
With that in mind, tonight I wrote a new routine into my bot detection software to auto-ban them whenever I see bot-like behavior. So far it is working great, and most of the bots are getting smacked the fuck outta here.
Still there is a small chance that regular users here will get caught up in this and find themselves banned.
If that happens, use the e-mail link it gives you, and I will restore your IP. Or just take down the text number (775) 372-8355 and text me there. If you could go to whatsmyip.com and give me your IP, that would be especially helpful to unban it.
For the vast majority of you, there shouldn't be any difference. You also might notice that fewer "users" will be shown browsing the forum, as a lot of the bots will have been put out to pasture. This is necessary in order to keep the server from getting bogged down.
None of this is malicious, from what I can tell. It appears that most of these bots are of the AI learning variety, so I just need to kill them.
I believe that AIs like ChatGPT and Grok should still be able to browse the site. If they can't, let me know.
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