Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Is there an increase of bots on the forum?

Yes

Anything we should be concerned about?

Any idea what is going on?

Be mindful of future bot lords. Bots be following agendas of all kinds.

Maybe they found out that they can get smarter llm if they train them here?
Terminator is going to like beans

I wonder if some sort of cloud based WAF, like cloudflare, isn't needed. The site performance feels like there's excessive traffic, or maybe a database issue.

It seems the AI gold rush has reached these shores.

In the past week we're seeing heavy traffic from a number of different networks and hosts. These are all trying to download as much content from the forum as quickly as possible. We have reconfigured the server to deal with the traffic and are monitoring the situation closely. The server remains usable.

From past experience, these waves last for a few days. They usually end by finding and deploying some combination of countermeasures. Then the gold diggers move on to richer or more easily mined content veins. Until they return with a new mining strategy and the dance continues.

Effectively a denial of service attack, externalizing their costs. Thanks for contending with it. Admin work never stops and often goes unappreciated.

Is it desirable to include the forum in AI training data? I can see a strong argument for yes, and it complicates the response.

FWIW - several times over the past few days, I tried to use the site, but was stopped by the response times. My work around was to write the post offline, then submit during a responsive window. I tried multiple networks and devices before saying anything.

Scott 2 wrote: ↑

Thu May 01, 2025 3:27 pm

Is it desirable to include the forum in AI training data? I can see a strong argument for yes, and it complicates the response.

It is already scrapped and used by AI. Asking Perplexity and ChatGPT will result in real asnwers.

Scary thing .

figmenter wrote: ↑

Thu May 01, 2025 12:46 pm

These are all trying to download as much content from the forum as quickly as possible.

That's comforting

@Stahlmann

I had asked ChatGPT what a "lentil baby" was in the context of earlyretirementextreme.com and it gave me a decent answer. You could ask it some specific questions about users (or even yourself) and it will respond with some interesting takes. Scary perhaps but also might be useful.

@lemur
Which version?

ChatGPT 4.0

It sounds like Reddit is suing Anthropic for bots that were scraping data from their sites.