About Recent Slowdowns

[Secret Squirrel]

We have privatized the discussion forum section of VGMdb to deal with a deluge of aggressive bots that have been targeting it exclusively. This means anyone who wishes to read any forum thread content will need to create an account and log in to it. For casual readers, this will only affect the album discussion threads, which are linked on the top right next to the edit button (and similarly, artist/product discussion threads). We may be able to find a technical solution to allow those threads to be displayed in a flat read-only format without being logged in, but that will take some time. The majority of the site content (including albums, artist, products, labels, and scans) are unaffected by this change.

[zierts]

As someone who frequents the VGMdb forums on an almost daily basis, this sucks. Any idea where the attacks might be coming from?

I hated having to see myriads of traditional online communities fall victim to big social media players such as Reddit and Discord. I hated VGMdb welcoming the hostile takeover with open arms. And not to sound too tinfoil hatty but with AI on the forefront, I wonder if any new users that joined forums since early 2023 have been planted as bots by corporations just to see what would happen. Sorry for all legitimate users.

Yay, progress.

[Zorbfish]

While I agree with you about the disappointment of all the centralization as a consequence of convenience (Discord, reddit, etc), it's probably just AI scrapers. They are damaging every aspect of the open web. Musicbrainz issued a similar statement about problems in December. I can only assume the previously public nature of the db+forums and unique dataset here finally caught on to the botnets.

A bit off topic but since I've only come back recently, and I couldn't find anything myself because AI is too short a term for the forum search, but did VGMdb ever announce any official stance on AI generated entries?

[Robin]

Originally Posted by Zorbfish

A bit off topic but since I've only come back recently, and I couldn't find anything myself because AI is too short a term for the forum search, but did VGMdb ever announce any official stance on AI generated entries?

It's been adressed on the Discord server every now and then, especially when even veteran VGM producers have just been giving in to AI, not only for cover arts, but even music itself now. Squirrel said the following:

I think our policy will be something like 1) Digital AI albums banned because that stuff can be generated infinitely; 2) Physical AI albums allowed, but we create another display designation like bootlegs or delayed albums so they are displayed with a big warning about the AI content.

[zierts]

Originally Posted by Secret Squirrel

We have privatized the discussion forum section of VGMdb to deal with a deluge of aggressive bots that have been targeting it exclusively.

Originally Posted by Zorbfish

While I agree with you about the disappointment of all the centralization as a consequence of convenience (Discord, reddit, etc), it's probably just AI scrapers. They are damaging every aspect of the open web. Musicbrainz issued a similar statement about problems in December. I can only assume the previously public nature of the db+forums and unique dataset here finally caught on to the botnets.

I noticed we started using Cloudflare security verification. But it seems whatever measures VGMdb has in place to prevent AI scraping are not working: I witnessed google.com/ai answering with content from this recent thread, going as far as posting the exact same song comparison links.

[Illidan]

Legit bots are not supposed to be blocked.