This comic follows on from the Previous comic which will almost certainly provide context.
You might not wanna be famous, but when you’re level 10, every organization within a mile is watching what you’re doing.
Here’s a short little “meanwhile” comic as a bonus, since it’s been a while.
Oh, apologies about my personal website. My hosting is done by a friend with a small server, and… well basically every wordpress site in existence is now under constant effective-DDoS by AI bots trying to scrape all the data. They’re not subtle about it, and just try to download all the pictures simultaneously. My server is too small to handle that load, so just reboots when that happens (it’s usually down for about a minute).
The fact that it’s near constantly down is just a product of how often I’m getting these requests.
Welcome back. I love these comics. The website situation is super shitty, I wish you luck on that endless battle.
I ended up just switching to your Tumblr page in my webcomic rotation to get around it.
Yeah, I post to tumblr, extwitter, mastodon, and bluesky. https://linktr.ee/ahdok
This won’t fix it but it might help.
Make sure you have a robots.txt file with a crawl delay set for all agents once every 30 seconds and that you are disallowing most of the WordPress directories such as WP admin, the media directory, etc.
I would also strongly recommend that you use a caching system if you are not using one. It’s a lot more efficient to serve the same image a hundred times to different bots from the ram than loading it off your drive.
Just my personal opinions working in a web hosting environment.
That’ll probably help if it’s i/o issues.
Yeah, you might need some combination of fail2ban for rude AI and cloudflare caching or something.
Whoever their host is, they already appear to have some type of load balancing based on the four IPS. But I would also agree that a free cloudflare account does wonders for most WordPress users. But that’s probably mostly because it filters out a shitload of bots and known bad actors. Just make sure you set up your origin certificates if you use a cloudflare account.
most of these AI scrapers don’t respect robots.txt, so I’m not sure that really helps much, but… we have tried doing all of these things.
Someone on lemmy suggested to create a dummy endpoint that normal people won’t be able to navigate to, and disallow it in robots.txt
Then when somebody crawls it you know they are ignoring robots.txt, and you ip ban them
Always happy to see you post!
Hnnnnggh. Cute af !fangmoe@ani.social.
Also belongs in !smolmoe@ani.social.
This is awesome! And something we should see more of in campaigns.
Some ideas for GMs of high level parties:
- Low level party seeks our your party for advice, or help with something outside of their abilities
- Newspaper reporter seeks interview for puff-piece about adventurer lifestyles
- Newspaper reporter seeks interview so they can write hit-piece on a party member
- Fans of the party’s exploits show up and ask for autographs
- That play scene from Avatar the Last Airbender
- Merchants keep pitching increasingly plausible investment opportunities
- Party encounters someone dressed up as the most famous member of the party, using their identity to claim free drinks at the pub
- Unskilled squire requests to join party to help with their adventures
- Legendary Swordsman seeks out party member for a duel
- Everyone you meet asks for money
Oh no, poor Konsi reaping what she unintentionally have sown.
…isn’t…all of that a reason why she’s not a disposable scapegoat? Isn’t the fact that she’s a public figure the best possible refutation of any of the criticisms just listed?
Well that, but also she’s still a goblin. Religious institutions in the Forgotten Realms traditionally view goblins as less than worthless, and most people in Waterdeep think of Goblins the same way, regardless of the person’s actual accomplishments.
Most people would assume that the church would be willing to abandon a goblin at a moment’s notice to protect their reputation - especially if they’re not familiar with the people involved, or the full extent of her deeds. Honestly, most people in Waterdeep think the church is tarnishing its reputation by having a goblin in their ranks in the first place.
I suppose as a coda… Real world conspiracy theories often take root more strongly when they don’t make complete sense. They’re often self-selecting for irrational actors.
If rational people are quick to point out flaws in your conspiracy theory, it feels more like there are powers trying to cover something up.
That, though, raises another question, because if the conspiracy theories are so easy to debunk that no rational person believes them, why worry about their existence? Unless the population is majority conspiracy theorists.
As for the church being ashamed to have a goblin in their ranks. She summoned an angel, presumably without outside help. Have the church very publicly say she’s one of their best spellcasters, not to mention a pillar of community, and they’re proud to have her in their ranks, doubly so after this generous contribution of much-needed funds. If it comes out that she was cheating, or the church helped her, well, that’s now a problem for the whole church. They wouldn’t put themselves in that spot.
If you didn’t want it to look like the church was easily bought, have the “pillar of community” press release precede the donation.
I remember when I was called a wack job for claiming we invaded Iraq under false pretenses.
Today, I’m called a wack job for purchasing a firearm. They drug a black man into a corn field and killed him a few weeks ago. The news spent a few seconds on it before moving on to a story about puppies.
It’s not rational to continue to trust governance. Yet, here we are still demonizing all that refuse to do so.
