When you're high level, people notice you. Shock! : rpgmemes

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Here's a short little "meanwhile" comic as a bonus, since it's been a while.

Oh, apologies about my personal website. My hosting is done by a friend with a small server, and... well basically every wordpress site in existence is now under constant effective-DDoS by AI bots trying to scrape all the data. They're not subtle about it, and just try to download all the pictures simultaneously. My server is too small to handle that load, so just reboots when that happens (it's usually down for about a minute).

The fact that it's near constantly down is just a product of how often I'm getting these requests.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

This won't fix it but it might help.

Make sure you have a robots.txt file with a crawl delay set for all agents once every 30 seconds and that you are disallowing most of the WordPress directories such as WP admin, the media directory, etc.

I would also strongly recommend that you use a caching system if you are not using one. It's a lot more efficient to serve the same image a hundred times to different bots from the ram than loading it off your drive.

Just my personal opinions working in a web hosting environment.

That'll probably help if it's i/o issues.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

most of these AI scrapers don't respect robots.txt, so I'm not sure that really helps much, but... we have tried doing all of these things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Someone on lemmy suggested to create a dummy endpoint that normal people won't be able to navigate to, and disallow it in robots.txt

Then when somebody crawls it you know they are ignoring robots.txt, and you ip ban them

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

That's pretty clever.

I think that these AI scrapers might be smart enough that this doesn't really work though - at least if I were designing them I'd have them all come from dynamic IPs and not have any of them bother hitting the same target more than once. These things are very dedicated to acquiring content without consent, and if they're capable of causing problems for (say) Reddit, I'm not sure my little website is going to have much luck deterring them.

Honestly a better strategy might be to just glaze everything I draw.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Honestly a better strategy might be to just glaze everything I draw.

I doubt that will help, they can still scrape the site and then wait until whatever version of Glaze was applied is cracked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I am not sure if it costs money, but you could implement captchas.

Or use cloudflare to do that bot detecting for you.

Worst case you make it so you need to create an account to see content.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Instead of a tech solution, why not a legal one? Place somewhere in the website that refusal to follow your robots.txt is agreement to pay you x amount of money for your content. Then combine that with the dummy page solution the other person brought up so you can record the IP address, then take them to court so they pay you. Has potential to bring you a really really nice chunk of money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I believe that there are multiple very high profile billion-dollar lawsuits being run against AI companies right now. I don't really have the budget to sue these companies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, you might need some combination of fail2ban for rude AI and cloudflare caching or something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Whoever their host is, they already appear to have some type of load balancing based on the four IPS. But I would also agree that a free cloudflare account does wonders for most WordPress users. But that's probably mostly because it filters out a shitload of bots and known bad actors. Just make sure you set up your origin certificates if you use a cloudflare account.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We are already using cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Have you also enabled Bot Fight Mode? (There's a setting to "Block AI bots" that seems useful in your situation)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

~~I shall mention it to my web admin~~

(Edit): Bot fight mode breaks wordpress' commenting system, which ideally I'd like to preserve.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Welcome back. I love these comics. The website situation is super shitty, I wish you luck on that endless battle.

I ended up just switching to your Tumblr page in my webcomic rotation to get around it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I post to tumblr, extwitter, mastodon, and bluesky. https://linktr.ee/ahdok

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do we have a church of konsi here in lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I think she has a lot of fans here :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

...isn't...all of that a reason why she's not a disposable scapegoat? Isn't the fact that she's a public figure the best possible refutation of any of the criticisms just listed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Well that, but also she's still a goblin. Religious institutions in the Forgotten Realms traditionally view goblins as less than worthless, and most people in Waterdeep think of Goblins the same way, regardless of the person's actual accomplishments.

Most people would assume that the church would be willing to abandon a goblin at a moment's notice to protect their reputation - especially if they're not familiar with the people involved, or the full extent of her deeds. Honestly, most people in Waterdeep think the church is tarnishing its reputation by having a goblin in their ranks in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I suppose as a coda... Real world conspiracy theories often take root more strongly when they don't make complete sense. They're often self-selecting for irrational actors.

If rational people are quick to point out flaws in your conspiracy theory, it feels more like there are powers trying to cover something up.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That, though, raises another question, because if the conspiracy theories are so easy to debunk that no rational person believes them, why worry about their existence? Unless the population is majority conspiracy theorists.

As for the church being ashamed to have a goblin in their ranks. She summoned an angel, presumably without outside help. Have the church very publicly say she's one of their best spellcasters, not to mention a pillar of community, and they're proud to have her in their ranks, doubly so after this generous contribution of much-needed funds. If it comes out that she was cheating, or the church helped her, well, that's now a problem for the whole church. They wouldn't put themselves in that spot.

If you didn't want it to look like the church was easily bought, have the "pillar of community" press release precede the donation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I think I'll answer this in two separate answers, so as not to conflate in-game issues with real-world issues.

To address the issue in the game world,. it's not quite as easy as issuing a statement of support. After all, It's already known that the church supports Konsi, a lot of people won't see the statement, and nothing they could say would come close to measuring up to open recognition of her deeds by the Open Lord...

The issue isn't really about Konsi's character at all, the issue is that there's an opportunity for opponents of the church to run a smear campaign, and there's no shortage of people who might want to do that.

Agents of Beshaba will not care if the majority of people believe them, and won't be trying to convince everyone. They just want to publicly allege corruption, throw in some doubt and confusion. They want to give ammunition to those who want to be convinced that the church is bad to back up those views. Give them ammunition to reinforce their existing beliefs.

There are plenty of people who dislike how much power the Tower of Luck has, especially over the gambling industry in Waterdeep. Some people don't want to pay fees or employ members of the tower to oversee games, it's almost like guild dues. Some people want to run crooked games, but find it difficult to find marks when all the reputable games are sponsored by the church. Some people believe that it's not the place of the church to be doing any of this, the size and power of the Tower of Luck isn't at all consistent with how the faith is normally represented - there are theologians who argue that Waterdhavian Tymoran faith is a heretical sect.

Some of the nobles who lost in the tournament might have a bit of a bruised ego from "losing to a goblin" - if they can cause a controversy about the match, claim there was a fix they can convince people around them, and themselves that they didn't "really" lose.

And... of course, those people who just absolutely hate, hate, hate goblins (of which there are many) will be inclined to believe the worst, no matter what anyone says or does.

If such attacks were made, would it seriously damage the church? Probably not - but it'll cost them a few people here and there. Worse, it could form the foundation of a sustained assault on the position and power they hold in Waterdeep, and it's the job of the church's leaders to protect that.

I imagine, if anything does happen, there will be more specific details in future comics...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It's like this, basically.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Always happy to see you post!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Hnnnnggh. Cute af [email protected].

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

those guys would probably like her :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Everyone likes her.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Pink dress Konsi ❤️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Oh... these colours are... specific :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Also belongs in [email protected].

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm so happy you're back!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I'm making comics as often as I can - this plotline has a fair few left to run.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This is awesome! And something we should see more of in campaigns.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Some ideas for GMs of high level parties:

Low level party seeks our your party for advice, or help with something outside of their abilities
Newspaper reporter seeks interview for puff-piece about adventurer lifestyles
Newspaper reporter seeks interview so they can write hit-piece on a party member
Fans of the party's exploits show up and ask for autographs
That play scene from Avatar the Last Airbender
Merchants keep pitching increasingly plausible investment opportunities
Party encounters someone dressed up as the most famous member of the party, using their identity to claim free drinks at the pub
Unskilled squire requests to join party to help with their adventures
Legendary Swordsman seeks out party member for a duel
Everyone you meet asks for money

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