exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Had a reply from Dal about AF. Short version: the server is dedicated to AF and backed up daily to his NAS, so there's no risk of anything being lost.

They're going to put Cloudflare in place and see how it holds up from there.

According to a post by one of the admins, all of the strict rules have been lifted in favour of switching to Cloudflare; which remains to be seen how efficient shielding will provide once another wave of AI bots arrive.

So anyone having a problem to reach Atari Forum, give it a chance!

Seems to be down again this morning...

Same here...

Down for me too. It was working great yesterday evening.

EDIT: It's back up again.

Last night it took 20 seconds to load the index then seemed a bit irratic on loading speeds but was otherwise "fine".

Just tried it now get the annoying tick box. So something changed since yesterday.


Dave over on the EEVblog forum saw the same thing from the other side. He ended up moving onto a paid Cloudflare plan to get at the better bot filtering, and the difference was obvious: with the protection off his guest count went into the hundreds of thousands and just sat there until the 502s started, while with the paid filtering on it peaked at 98k and fell back to 47k overnight. So it clearly does pull a lot out, but the catch is that the bots have started running JavaScript and cookies properly now, and most of these defences are leaning on exactly that as the test for whether something is a real browser. It works today because faking a browser costs the scrapers real money, and that is the only reason. Once the sums change it stops being a test at all, and everyone depending on it will be back where they started.

Which is why we went the other way here. Rather than trying to work out who is a bot and block them, the approach has been to make serving a page cost us as close to nothing as possible, so it stops mattering who is asking. Every filtering scheme has to be right about the visitor, and that is the part that keeps breaking. A page served out of the cache costs the same whether it is a member, Google, or a scraper farm doing its best impression of a mobile phone.

DoG wrote: 05 Oct 2026 08:06 EDIT: It's back up again.

Yup, back to normal.

They're now using Cloudflare and for the first time in months I can login without Tor tricks.

robv wrote: 05 Oct 2026 09:36 They're now using Cloudflare and for the first time in months I can login without Tor tricks.

Cool. Even my mobile works now. It's been connection refused for ages.

BW

I get this everytime I visit AF now . Its like many other sites, just gets annoying clicking the thing 50 times a day.


From what I quickly searched, CF fails on private browsers like Brave and filtered IP's like I use etc. So it seems any privacy things, CF trips up on :roll: