According to “Is the Site Down” the forum is offline. Is anyone else having difficulty reaching the site, or for that matter has anyone reached it in the past couple of days?
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I’m reading your post, so I guess it isn’t.
Welcome to ILP!
@iambiguous noted this:
Sorry, I meant the Philosophy Now forum was down. It seems to be back up now. Thank you for the welcome.
Hi! Thanks for the info, I haven’t tried since about 3 months ago, will try and get back to you.
Maybe they’re reorganizing or something like it.
I see they’ve been dealing with a bot problem. We’ve had that problem here as well: on 4/26 we got about 150x as many pageviews from crawlers as from real people (3k for humans vs. 450k for bots).
Discourse handles that load much better than phpBB did, but I expect the load to keep growing. The need for inputs into AI language models is insatiable.
EDIT: looking a bit more into it, this is almost entirely Anthropic – claudebot has almost 1.7m pageviews in the past month.
Are you saying that there are “language models“ reading the content?
Must be striking a nerve.
Forum data is probably a good source for AI chat bots who are trying to imitate human conversations: back-and-forth text exchanges, often grouped by topic, sometimes with metadata like quotes and likes that add more context. And since lots of sites use the same forum software, it’s probably easy to clean up the data to maximize the signal of humans doing language at each other.
Well we better give them something to talk at us about, then.
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