Post #1611469

2026-04-23 01:48 UTC

@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.

Replies (2)

@v1sta@mastodon.art 2026-04-23 08:43

@kirb The situation in China is complex, far more than just the GFW. Many people also various issues due to upstream carriers' QoS, NAT, DNS pollution, cheap routers, and cross settlement speed limits from carriers. Someone can be, someone maybe not. Geek readers to solve tech problems. However, national factors also considered force majeure. In China, there are basically only three providers for homeusers, CT, CM from toots, and China Unicom. They also have corresponding AS networks.

Open ##1611470
@v1sta@mastodon.art 2026-04-23 08:54

@kirb And thank your comments! By the way, IP from Alibaba is essentially for commercial use. I don't know Alibaba has Home Broadband products. Some proxies might use Alibaba AliYun VPS as a relay route, but new policies in China are cracking down on this. I'm using Proxmox VE to built my Windows XP Media Center retro HTPC, and the Windows Home Server, even I got updated XPMCE to SP3 and PowerPacks PP2(SP3) for WHS2007. Thank you and communitys!

Open ##1611472