NNTP access to FLTK forums

[duncan gibson]

I primarily use the FLTK Newsgroup interface to all of the forums,

but I'm getting an error message that it is suspended.

Is this temporary, or is the interface being withdrawn?

[Greg Ercolano]

    Temporary workaround until I can block all the crazy AI scraper
    bot farms from slamming the server into the ground.

    In the last year or so, unthrottled bots randomly go on AI harvesting
    campaigns, DoS'ing our server while trying to devour 20+ years of
    newsgroup content in a feeding frenzy. They're using unthrottled
    tools on large farms that cause the fltk.org server to be unresponsive
    for long periods.

    For the health of the server, the fltk.org web interface is a simple page
    so the bots skip over it. The page currently recommends you use the
    google groups web interface and/or the NNTP interface.

    What I probably have to do is make fltk.org web access to the newsgroups
    require a login or simple captcha to keep the crazy bots at bay.

    NOTE: If you really are using NNTP (subject of this thread),
    i.e. news://fltk.org:1024/ , then you should not be having trouble.
    AFAIK the NNTP news server works fine.

    If you are having trouble with actual NNTP access, please follow up with details.

[duncan gibson]

Greg wrote:
    NOTE: If you really are using NNTP (subject of this thread),
    i.e. news://fltk.org:1024/ , then you should not be having trouble.
    AFAIK the NNTP news server works fine.

No, sorry for the confusion. I'm using the Forums tab at https://www.fltk.org

i.e. https://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php which now shows the "disabled" text.

That way I also see the commits, bugs, and issues that are not googlegroups.

It's a great many years since I actually used NNTP directly. What nostalgia :-)

[Greg Ercolano]

On 1/25/26 03:42, duncan gibson wrote:

Greg wrote:
    NOTE: If you really are using NNTP (subject of this thread),
    i.e. news://fltk.org:1024/ , then you should not be having trouble.
    AFAIK the NNTP news server works fine.

No, sorry for the confusion. I'm using the Forums tab at https://www.fltk.org

i.e. https://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php which now shows the "disabled" text.

That way I also see the commits, bugs, and issues that are not googlegroups.

    Ah, OK, good.

    Yes, the commits/bugs/issues all show up on NNTP as well as separate groups
    you can subscribe to, so you should be able to keep up that way.

    I use Thunderbird as my NNTP client, and it's always seemed to work well.
    Not sure what other clients are out there.

    Just be sure to change the port to 1024.

It's a great many years since I actually used NNTP directly. What nostalgia :-)

    Ha, indeed.
    NNTP has been the back end to all our newsgroups/forums since 2003.

[duncan gibson]

    NOTE: If you really are using NNTP (subject of this thread),
    i.e. news://fltk.org:1024/ , then you should not be having trouble.
    AFAIK the NNTP news server works fine.

 

    I use Thunderbird as my NNTP client, and it's always seemed to work well.

    Not sure what other clients are out there.

Well after quite a bit of faffing about, trying to get connected without setting up

Thunderbird as ,my default email system, and connecting to "news.fltk.org" by

mistake, and having to remember by fltk.org username/password, I've finally

got Thunderbird to connect and I can all of the fltk.* newsgroups.

Can't say I like the Thunderbird interface though :-(

Thanks for the heads-up

 

[Greg Ercolano]

On 1/30/26 08:28, duncan gibson wrote:

Well after quite a bit of faffing about, trying to get connected without setting up

Thunderbird as ,my default email system, and connecting to "news.fltk.org" by

mistake, and having to remember by fltk.org username/password, I've finally

got Thunderbird to connect and I can all of the fltk.* newsgroups.

    Hmm, unless I'm forgetting something, no password should be needed for NNTP access.

Can't say I like the Thunderbird interface though :-(

    I'm so used to the Thunderbird email interface it just seems "standard" to me.
    Very curious what interface you're used to. (screenshot?)

    I have all the fltk.xxx groups show up in my sidebar (where my Inbox, Trash,
    and other mail folders and different email accounts show up)

    Opera used to have a decent news client, but they dropped that feature when
    they switched to a chromium engine, many years ago.

    pan seems to be a good client; very simple and snappy, based on Gnome.
    I just tried it; easy to install; on my Ubuntu 24.x machine: sudo apt install pan
    It opens immediately into a config dialog: just set fltk.org as the "server address"
    and 1024 as the port, leave everything else default, no username/password.

    "pan" screenshot below (very similar to Thunderbird's interface).
    Pan seems like it might have trouble decoding some HTML based posts; I noticed some messages
    showing html tags. Thunderbird has always been very solid at handling HTML emails/news msgs.

[Greg Ercolano]

On 1/25/26 02:06, Greg Ercolano wrote:

On 1/25/26 00:40, duncan gibson wrote:

I primarily use the FLTK Newsgroup interface to all of the forums, but I'm getting an error message that it is suspended.
Is this temporary, or is the interface being withdrawn?

    Temporary workaround until I can block all the crazy AI scraper bot farms from slamming the server into the ground.

    In the last year or so, unthrottled bots randomly go on AI harvesting campaigns, DoS'ing our server [..]

    OK, a follow up regarding the web interface to accessing the forums/newsgroups.

    I'm tenatively re-enabling the web interface to the newsgroup articles.

    I'm trying a caching technique that should decrease the load on the server when bots index the forums.

    There'll be an initial cpu load hit over the next day or so while the bots start indexing the newsgroups, building the forum cache.
    Once it's built, the load should decrease. So we might see the fltk.org server slow down while the cache builds.

    If this technique works, eventually google searches will return to returning results pointing to the fltk forums/news articles.

    However, if we continue to have trouble with the server due to bot activity, I'll have to disable it again.
    These untuned AI scraping bots are a serious menance to the entire internet; many seem to have no throttles at all, and reindex the same info by the hundreds from cpu farms like amazon's and google's cloud services.