Why is it that I can post the attached mp4 but not the source as a gif?
To make the mp4 I encoded the gif in handbrake, which actually made increased the file size but reduced the dimensions.
Source gif: 728*408, 785.5 KiB
Encoded mp4: 640*360, 836.7 KiB
5.71MB is plenty generous. I’d give up 5MB of that if we could have anonymous browsing again. I can’t recommend Mbin to people if they have to log in to see anything. Would converting all uploads to WebP lighten the load?
I reenabled anonymous access and predictably the site started getting hammered immediately. I blocked a bunch of broad IP ranges that were the biggest sources but I’m sure I’ve probably blocked some legit people.
Holy crap, that sucks! Why can’t those scrapers just scrape each other? I’m sorry, I didn’t want to pressure you to open up to that kind of abuse. I want to think of ways to help this situation, but you’re probably 10 steps ahead of me. Thank you for trying so hard.
Oh, is that why most mbin sites have gone registration-only?
kagis
https://joinmbin.org/releases/
I expect that this is going to be something of a whack-a-mole game — I saw a post the other day about how some scrapers had started completing Anubis challenges (though it was apparently via doing the work, and I imagine that the cost could just be increased as appropriate).
@hitstun connections to mbin are super heavy weight, which is fine if it were legit people browsing, but the AI scrapers endlessly hammering the site with hundreds or thousands of requests per minute ends up taking the whole site down. I’ll try opening it up again and see what happens and try to block as many crawlers as I can, but it’s been hundreds of net blocks in the past interspersed with other actual fediverse instances. Let’s see what happens.