Post #1611468

2026-04-22 17:00 UTC

@kirb Real Chinese user at here, many people prefer to use proxy services if wanted. But somebody may lack the ability to find how to bypass Great Firewall, they maybe can't complete Captcha challenge. Perhaps the GFW has become less strict than before in order to exempt spiders.. It depends on whether you want to keep them; Chinese users don't have a very good reputation. I also really dislike those spider scraping by AI company from China. Does it affect Legacy Update?

Replies (1)

@kirb@hachyderm.io 2026-04-23 01:48

@v1sta Thanks for the info. Is the issue that Cloudflare captchas might not load correctly in China? Is it slow, or does it tend to not work at all? When I make broad firewall rules like this, I always set it to show a captcha, never to fully block it. Chinese users still deserve the same access to this information as the rest of the world. Currently no plans to restrict anything on Legacy Update, we haven’t had any issues there. MediaWiki is problematic with these scrapers, because every article has dozens of meta links (history, what links here, etc) that have even more links. Search engines work slowly to not hurt the server, and can be told to skip links that are pointless (robots.txt), but these AI scrapers download as fast as possible and ignore robots.txt. The Legacy Update website on the other hand is minimal and doesn’t have anything we need to worry about. The heaviest part is the Windows Update server, which scrapers would have no idea how to access.

Open ##1611469