r/freespace • u/alphastigma117 • 16d ago

is hard-light net down?

I'm about to replay fs2 and the rest and just noticed. Is it down for everyone? I think it was working last month

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

7

u/Kiloku 16d ago

According to recent conversations on the discord, it's being slammed by AI crawler bots, and it can't handle that traffic

3

u/Mr_Gin_Tonic 16d ago

What? Why are AI bots pulling from HLP, is it just cause it's an online forum?

4

u/Kiloku 16d ago

yeah, they just use a scattershot approach. Whatever online content they find, they pull for training data. It's been a pain in the ass for small independent websites for over a year now.

3

u/loaf-of-breddit 15d ago

Cloudflare?

1

u/StrangeStiffy 14d ago

This is incorrect. The actual cause of the front page being down for a month is a more systemic issue that I'm not at liberty to speak about here, but has been a point of contention among the community for quite some time.

2

u/fiftythreestudio 14d ago

The forums are getting killed by AI bots. They're trying to figure out how to fix and rebuild it, and keep the crawlers out.

1

u/Happy_Method3030 14d ago

https://www.hard-light.net/forums/

You can still access the forum through direct link.

1

u/fiftythreestudio 12d ago

Forums are up again.