Hello everyone!
Today we've started moving our traffic through Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare's network is designed to filter out more bot traffic than we previously filtered out.
What does this mean for me?
Hopefully, it doesn't impact you at all! It is possible that if you view hundreds and hundreds of pages, you may be presented with a captcha. It is also possible that if you use a VPN, Tor, or other anonymizing sources, you may be impacted.
Why make this change?
As unfortunate as it is - there's the real possibility that bots are having a really big impact on our traffic quality, and putting us in a bad spot with our advertisers. No advertisers, no $$$. It's a pretty simple equation for a free site. This hasn't been completely verified, but it's what I believe is going on.
Hey - I have a bot that relies on your site! What about me?
If you use our API: That will still work the same as normal!
If you scrape pages outside of the API: Please use our API! https://wall.alphacoders.com/api.php is 100% still active. Even if your bot can't access user pages, it will still be able to access our api! 150,000 free queries/month is a lot! I personally don't have a problem with anyone scraping the site in nearly any fashion - but the negative impact I'm currently seeing is completely unprecendented, and I absolutely have to try this route.
Please let me know if this negatively impacts you. Thank you for your understanding.