Great! Thanks, Hilary, Max, Susan, Julie, and Richard.
Given your reactions, I don’t feel quite as bad about this second blow to what was hitherto universal access to Eratosphere. I say “second” because I never got around to announcing the first such limitation I implemented a couple of months ago:
Certain countries are now blocked from accessing Eratosphere. This came about after the site database began crashing repeatedly due to excessive spam and web-scraping bot activity. We had never encountered this issue before the recent surge in aggressive bot scraping driven by the AI arms race. Before that, we’d typically see fewer than a thousand such bots at any given time. Suddenly, that number spiked to over 100,000. Since implementing the country restrictions, the number has dropped to under 10,000—still high, but no longer enough to cause frequent server overloads.
In brief, to better protect our forums from overwhelming botnets and malicious traffic, I’ve recently blocked server access from the following countries: China, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. This measure helps keep Able Muse/Eratosphere stable and secure for our members. If anyone is inadvertently affected, please contact me directly with details so I can review and advise. Also, if you know of any legitimate user from one of those countries, let me know—I may be able to unblock their specific IP address to restore access.
🌍 Banned Countries (via IP-level firewall blocks)
Country Reason
China 🇨🇳 High volume of botnets, scraping, and state-sponsored intrusion attempts
Russia 🇷🇺 Frequent brute-force attacks, spambot floods, and state-level threats
Ukraine 🇺🇦 Surging botnet activity since wartime instability
North Korea 🇰🇵 State-sponsored hacking and malware distribution
Iran 🇮🇷 Persistent malicious traffic and brute-force login attempts
Brazil 🇧🇷 High botnet traffic and DDoS origin points
Turkey 🇹🇷 Spam campaigns, fake account generators
India 🇮🇳 Web scraping, ad click fraud, unsolicited traffic
Vietnam 🇻🇳 Credential stuffing, botnet deployment
As an aside, the USA is actually in the top five for malicious bot activity… but no one bans the USA!
Cheers,
...Alex
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