It's as pretty much as exxos says. Either the phpBB forum admin runs their own firewall / filter system (which requires a lot of work), uses Cloudflare or restricts the forum to logged in members only, or more likely, a combination of these things.mikro wrote: 17 Jul 2026 12:32 One thing really worries me: it's great and really appreciated that @1024MAK and others are so cooperative with white-listing people who ask for it. However I'm 100% confident that those people (who frequent more than one forum, regularly, reading all topics) are minority in comparison to people who visit atari-forum.com, see that it is down and leave. Then try in a week, in a month and then never return ever again.
I'm really worried when I see all those "we are busy", "we are working on it" etc posts because we are losing precious members of the community who maybe will never find their way back to AF again (believe or not there are people who are registered for a decade and have never made more than a couple of posts, not being in touch with anyone else).
I totally get that this is a free time activity and it's a thankless job but I can't understand why you don't accept external help and rather keep the forum dying right in front of our eyes. :(
I mean this in the best possible way, I'm just incredibly sad to see shrinking my most beloved forum (sorry Exxos ;)) day by day.
That's what these AI scraper bots and other scraper bots (that ignore rules files and which pretend to be humans) have resulted in.
I don't know the details on how the admin on Atari-Forum has implemented the firewall / filter system, I'm only a messenger.
As said above, lots of small forums are affected by these problems.
I will continue passing on messages if members want me to. But please do include the information that is needed. That includes your Atari-Forum user name, your browser user agent details and your IPv4 address or address range (and IPv6 if you can).
Mark