Good evening,

Over the past couple of years, there has been a steadily increasing volume of spider bots from large foreign IT companies, collecting data to feed their neural networks. A few months ago this spiked up to unbearable numbers everywhere, all across the internet, within the same day, and people began really taking notice.

This lead to the development of FOSS proof-of-work captchas, which are now used on all kinds of smaller sites. The main POW captcha system currently in place on most sites is Anubis, but we weren't happy with it. We attempted to deploy Vaxry's Anubis-inspired alternative "Checkpoint" but it was very buggy when we first used it as we were one of the earliest adopters.

Some time later, we have now redeployed Checkpoint. Right now, it is only on our Git server, since that was where we were being hit the hardest. You should notice a performance increase on all Worlio pages. Hopefully, you should not have to wait one or two minutes just to open your file manager anymore. If you use our Git (like only four of you, since it's registrations were always closed and there are only a few projects hosted on it) you'll especially notice an improvement. I measured roughly 50% faster load times opening my own repositories.

We also updated the Terms of Service, in light of recent laws being enacted in the UK, and some planned features for the eventual Worlio overhaul.

If you run into any issues please PM me.

Bonk

Assuming this is why worlds.worlio.com is no longer accessible from my Win 98 pc.

Oops. Just fixed that

does this affect tor?

No, the spam filters are deactivated on the Worlio Forums and user files to keep compatibility with older clients, so you should be fine.
We only have it enabled on high-value targets for bots like our Git server and a couple other places where dedicated scrapers for our frontend software already exist. Those get a large amount of bot traffic that is easily distinguishable from genuine traffic, and easily consume more bandwidth than our forum.
The main Worlio site's account creation captchas are good enough.