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Title: Website down...
Date: April 10, 2025
Mood: Defeated

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  So, I was *going* to write about how I've been reading
through old FIDONET News zines[0] and enjoying the look
into the past, but I got a notification from a script about
my site getting a huge uptick in traffic. Figuring it was
the AI bots cycling around, I opened up SSH, checked the
nginx logs, and... No. It wasn't the scrapers.

  Something stirred the hornet nest, because my VPS was
getting slammed by a buch of security scanners and bots for
credential theft (AWS, github, gitlab, etc.). I didn't have
time to sift through everything, so I just shut off nginx
to give me time to make a game plan. My site isn't vital
for business or anything, but it hurts having to take it
down like this.

  I didn't ask for any of the scans I was seeing, and the
malicious bots were definitely not requested. At least for
the security scanners, they seem to be from legit sources,
but like hell I'm going to say I wanted it when I didn't
ask for it.

  While I write this, I'm taking time to do updates on the
server, getting it fully up-to-date just in case. I'm so
damned tired of the attacks, and I'm not entirely sure if
I really even want to continue with a public /web/site at
this point. I'd still keep Gopher, and maybe add Gemini or
Spartan (probably Spartan), but this whole issue with bots
just makes it less worth handling on my own anymore. Even
more so if money starts getting involved with bandwidth
costs and such.

  Hell, maybe this'll get me to look into setting up a BBS,
or get me to try and get on FIDONET. As much interest as I
seem to have in them... I'm starting to question if the
smolweb/indieweb has much of a self-hosted future with how
things are going right now. I don't like that I'm thinking
such things, but hey, the smolnet is more than just the
smolweb, and we can keep going without it...I hope.

  Today is definitely going to be a "work on getting shit
done" day now.

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[0]: That's actually what inspired me to go 60 columns for
     my phlog.