P99 wiki constantly down

[druidbob]

What has been the deal with the wiki lately? Seems like every other day I go on there to check something only to get "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties." It would crash every now and then in the past but it was never this bad before.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Bots have been saturating the forums and wiki for a while now. While I don't think the explicit purpose is to DDoS the forums/wiki, that ends up being the effect. My guess is AI tools training on web data and bad actors trying to inject ads into the wiki/forums. That has happened before.

You can use the wayback machine for now. I doubt too much has changed on the wiki.

[Ciderpress]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

[loramin]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

There's much more incentive to assault the wiki. Let's say you're selling penis pills: you have some spammy penis pill website that Google won't touch.

But if a lot of respected sites link to your penis pill site, some of their respectability rubs off on your site, and it starts ranking higher on Google ... which means more $$$ for you.

Now, the truth is, Google isn't dumb, so getting your penis pill site on our wiki will do either nothing or almost nothing ... but this approach used to work, and maybe still does, a little. Spammers either do it for the tiny bit it helps, or because they don't follow SEO and don't realize it doesn't work

Meanwhile, a random link or two in a forum post has even less chance of improving page rank. Some spammers still try it, but most don't bother.

[OriginalContentGuy]

Spammers either do it for the tiny bit it helps, or because they don't follow SEO and don't realize it doesn't work


Clearly the wording of someone trying to keep the penis gains to himself.

[Reiwa]

I'm confused though because while bots have definitely been flooding the forums, it never (or rarely) seems to influence forum performance. Meanwhile wiki is like.... totally borked.

Forums do get slow when they're actively scraping.

I think they maybe have gotten it all by now?

[CrazyPro]

It's because of a horribly implemented pigparse feature that scrapes the wiki every single time someone targets a mob.

[Jimjam]

Where is our Masked crusader with an abundance of trannyporn? Only they can save us by making the forums and wiki a black-listed area for bots to trawl!!

[plonkster]

Putting the whole p99 bunch of websites behind the free Cloudflare plan would probably fix the issue.

It takes 15 minutes to set up and I'm willing to help if the admins lack the experience working with Cloudflare.

[loramin]

It's because of a horribly implemented pigparse feature that scrapes the wiki every single time someone targets a mob.

This may be true, but we definitely also have a problem with wiki spammers I personally had to remove hundreds of pages (one by one :mad:) of spam for penis pills and other crap from the wiki (before Rogean turned new signups off).

[Cbaci]

From a quick scan of chrome dev tools shows it's the CSS that's gaffing. but it could be my openclaw discord bot responding to voice prompts for "How to make it so my EQ ranger wont die so much on P99"

[Jimjam]

This may be true, but we definitely also have a problem with wiki spammers I personally had to remove hundreds of pages (one by one :mad:) of spam for penis pills and other crap from the wiki (before Rogean turned new signups off).

But i really need more pp.

[Ruluvien]

It's because of a horribly implemented pigparse feature that scrapes the wiki every single time someone targets a mob.

Not sure I buy that. If that was the case surely someone with some common since would have turned that feature off by now.

[bcbrown]

Not sure I buy that. If that was the case surely someone with some common since would have turned that feature off by now.

It's true.

https://github.com/smasherprog/EqTool/blob/ecec31900d679904235eff849a0ef4637e118920/EQTool/Services/WikiApi.cs#L107

[Goregasmic]

It's true.

https://github.com/smasherprog/EqTool/blob/ecec31900d679904235eff849a0ef4637e118920/EQTool/Services/WikiApi.cs#L107

This isn't new though?

The software stack all reached EOL, some as far as 2015.

Could be overloaded by other shit like spammers or AI scrappers too I guess? Not my area of expertise.

[bcbrown]

No, not new. When I looked into it it seems like that feature's been included for 2-3 years, and one of the maintainers is starting to add some caching that should help, but it's still unfinished. I don't think that's the only cause of the wiki issues but it certainly doesn't help!

[Dgc2002]

This isn't new though?

The software stack all reached EOL, some as far as 2015.

Could be overloaded by other shit like spammers or AI scrappers too I guess? Not my area of expertise.


The amount of traffic generated by the previous version of this PigParse feature is probably a blip on the radar compared modern scrapers/bots. Without something like CloudFlare between your site and the open internet you'll be hammered all day by indiscriminate bots.

I would honestly be surprised if traffic volume is really taking down the Wiki. I just tested with a mirror of the wiki and each mob/item page is a few hundred kB which is nothing.

[loramin]

Our wiki stack is outdated, deliberately, because much of it is custom. Think of all those tables on a zone page, for instance: there's no way to do them with wiki stuff, so Rahvin had to write custom PHP code ... many years ago when the wiki started.

Back to hen we had up to date Mediawiki software, but many years have passed, and Rahvin quit. So now if we update, all his stuff (ie. big chunks of the wiki) breaks, so we're stuck with old software.

This also is an issue with wiki spammers: a simple CAPTCHA would stop them, but our wiki is too outdated to do CAPTCHAs. I offered to custom code one, but Rogean turned me down ... so presumably he has another solution in mind, and the wiki is down while he implements it (unless he's decided to not have a wiki anymore).

[loramin]

The amount of traffic generated by the previous version of this PigParse feature is probably a blip on the radar compared modern scrapers/bots. Without something like CloudFlare between your site and the open internet you'll be hammered all day by indiscriminate bots.

I would honestly be surprised if traffic volume is really taking down the Wiki. I just tested with a mirror of the wiki and each mob/item page is a few hundred kB which is nothing.

The devil is on the details. For instance, even 0kb requests require server effort, and enough such requests can take down a server.

Similarly, overloading is more about lots of requests at one time. Wiki servers are web servers: they're designed to handle a basic number of requests at any given time, so it's about making a lot more requests than it can handle at once.

It does seem unlikely to me that a tool (even a horribly written one that makes tons of requests) would consistently, over time, overload the wiki ... but if most of a guild uses it and they all spam requested the same raid mob page, that certainly could slow or crash it briefly.

I'd suspect the bigger issue is AI agents, which are overloading servers all over the Internet right now. But like I said, the devils in the details, and since I don't have access to the wiki server logs, I don't have those details ... so this is just speculation.

[Jimjam]

Speaking of overwhelmed by bots 26093 theer can be dozens of clearly spam accounts processing registration at a time and maybe twenty thousand unregistered viewers (not human) trawling the site at a time.

[aaezil]

There's much more incentive to assault the wiki. Let's say you're selling penis pills: you have some spammy penis pill website that Google won't touch.

But if a lot of respected sites link to your penis pill site, some of their respectability rubs off on your site, and it starts ranking higher on Google ... which means more $$$ for you.

Now, the truth is, Google isn't dumb, so getting your penis pill site on our wiki will do either nothing or almost nothing ... but this approach used to work, and maybe still does, a little. Spammers either do it for the tiny bit it helps, or because they don't follow SEO and don't realize it doesn't work

Meanwhile, a random link or two in a forum post has even less chance of improving page rank. Some spammers still try it, but most don't bother.

How many penis pills would ya say, ya take every week?

[magnetaress]

It's time to feed the wiki to an AI