Sorry for the outages: Bot spam is pushing our servers to the limit

Since May 17, our site has been hard to reach, and we want to say sorry for the trouble, especially to our subscribers. The cause is a heavy wave of bots crawling our pages and pushing our servers to their limit. Over the weekend, the database connection dropped several times, which led our hosting provider to block a user agent. That cut down the spam, but it also locked some of you out of the site.

We are working at full speed on a lasting fix and would welcome help from anyone in the community with the right know-how. Since the bot spam is so severe, with Perplexity in particular on our radar, we may have to put up with further outages until things are stable again.