Hey, so i banned it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was mainly unmoderated and was causing a lot of mod reports we had to resolve under various spam and wrong community reports. There was sometimes a fair bit of porn it was reposting iirc too, which causes a fair few issues especially if it was reposting copyrighted material.

Secondly, it was taking up a lot of space. It had something like 1.5 million posts at the time I banned it. It was causing the user page to fail to load for admins because of just how big the search queries were becoming in the database. It wasn’t manageable anymore.

Thirdly it was only very infrequently upvoted/interacted with locally, to the point it went weeks without interaction where we stored tens of thousands of posts and subsequent thumbnails for no apparent reason.

We don’t have unlimited budget and storage is our biggest risk factor to cost, so ultimately we have to be pragmatic about hosting that content. We don’t have the budget of some of the larger servers unfortunately.

Hope that helps 😊

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Thanks, i’ve added you as a mod to the xbox community!

Might be worth creating a runescape community with your .zip account, then within 24 hours all the other instances should start federating with it again.

@[email protected] do you want to mod it? Apparently yes it can be restored

.ml banned the mod

Ah yeah, my bad.

I don’t know what will happen if I recreate it, probably break everything. Will give it a shot.

I thought it had been locked before being deleted though, obviously not!

Hey, welcome along! 😁

Straight on the wishlist

Ah good, what everyone said would happen is exactly what is happening.

Sure its not the data verification company directly, but proves that the whole process is so sufficiently complex that your ID could end up with multiple different providers and then be stolen. Not great.

That’s like the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me 😭

Thank you ❤️ massively appreciate it!

I will look into liberapay if people want to use it!

Thanks for being part of it!

Thank you for being here!

It’s very annoying.

I will add that as I host it myself, there are probably additional things a user doesn’t see - Piefed is great. but they really need a pass at making sure all the cool things they are adding are easy to set up, documented well, and accessible.

One example is that on the admin page, there are lots of tabs with different things to configure. Then, for some reason, a different set of tabs is at the bottom of the page with different names for some of the same tabs, and others that are missing from the top etc.

I fully appreciate the active and constant development, but it really needs a UI pass.

FYI these are all on ASN 49453

The other (lazier) option is to block/challenge the ASN

Yes, thats because Hexbear is proxying the image from lemmy.zip, not serving it via hexbear.

We do the same at lemmy.zip, it’s good practice, but you are then interacting directly with lemmy.zip to get our images, hence why it breaks if you block lemmy.zip

One of the images from the OP that they were challenged on is: https://hexbear.net/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.zip%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F9925d030-56d3-464b-95bf-8f59dd591496.webp

ETA: If Hexbear wasn’t using the proxy, then the user would be served the image from hexbear itself and therefore our cloudflare challenge would never kick in, because the user would never visit lemmy.zip and it would all be handled server side, which isn’t happening in this case.

OP is likely using a VPN on which the ASN is part of our challenge rules following waves of scraping attacks from those ASNs.

Not only are those scrapes stealing our user’s data and ignoring the do not scrape instructions, they are so overwhelming as to have taken the site offline previously.

It’s not a misconfiguration, rather a deliberate challenge to prevent scrape activity reoccurring.

Federation works fine between hexbear and .zip and likely does for most users. This behaviour is happening because hexbear uses the image proxy (which is good) and so isn’t serving you the images directly, which is why the user is hitting up against .zips’ challenges.

We monitor the solve rate on the challenges to make sure we’re not catching too many real people in the challenges and effectively preventing the scrapes - as of right now, in the last 24 hours alone we’ve prevented almost 400,000 scrape connections with only 21 solves (i.e. real people). I fully appreciate its annoying, but we’re not running on a meta/twitter/Google budget over here! We have to take steps to protect the site as a whole.

If we weren’t doing this with cloudflare, we’d be doing the exact same thing with anubis or outright blocking those ASNs entirely.

@[email protected] FYI.

Definitely something was up, the server maxed out.

Seems similar behaviour to when someone imports their settings from another instance, which caused a lot of problems during the .ee migration, however I’ll see if I can find any other reasons for it.