Hey everyone! Its you're friendly neighborhood absent-minded wiki admin here with a State of the Wiki update

State of AI Crawlers and busted allowed bandwidth/cpu

So. A lot of the stuff I did a few months back to reduce AI crawlers absolutely destroying the available bandwidth/cpu processing on the hosting site has helped out - but i was still getting notifications of "Youve used 80% of your quota" near the end of each month. I dont *think* the sites went down at all due to that over the last 6 months or so but ... maybe. I donno. I havent been keeping that close attention 😄. And unfortunately this also lead to geolocation bans on ips originating from China, Brazil, and a few other asian countries.

But anyway. Renewal time is coming up and so I thought "Maybe i should look at hosting these somewhere else where I have more control" and after a day of fiddling around with that and deciding its not worth it, I also said "eh. Lets sign up for Cloudflare finally"

Boy I should have done *that* earlier

So both Sentinelswiki (and Spirit Island wiki even tho the two are no longer under the same company control anymore) are now behind Cloudflare. As of this post, Sentinels has been there for about 72 hours and Spirit island about 24.

let me tell you...

in the last ~24 hours this is the AI Crawler stats from Spiritislandwiki.com

24 hour spirit island ai crawlers stats

And this is Sentinelswiki.com

24 hour sentinels ai crawler stats

And you can see this has had a huge effect on the CPU seconds being spent on this crap

cpu seconds for the hosting account

Ive since blocked Anthropic's from Spiritisland - i meant to do that from the start, but there were issues with the name registars moving the name servers to point away from my host to Cloudflare so that got lost. Talk about crazy tho.

A note: Bing's crawler is blocked on both sites cause it was hitting them like 200 times an hour. This may make searches on big a bit... weird... but honestly... These wiki's have been up for ever, since before 'a wiki for everything' was super common, and so if you search information on either game there are dozens and dozens of reddit/bgg/forum/blog posts that all reference the wiki. People will find their way to it, I'm sure. And seriously, bing, why you gotta crawl nearly 2500 times a day eh? It doesn't change that much yeesh.

For you? No change - mostly.

So. For the most part this should be seen as very little difference for your average user. Some pages may load faster. Maybe. I'm not taking full advantage of the caching Cloudflare CDNs bring, but it is a wiki and such caching can have a real negative impact on editing it in a timely manner (it can really muck up "seeing" the edit)

Myself and a few others have had a few "Something Suspicious" warnings from Firefox specifically (I dont see those warnings on Edge or Chrome) about a cert issue - this is because i issued brand new certs to make sure that things were lined up correctly. Clear your cookies if you see this, that generally has resolved it.

But not even ever firefox user has reported it so who knows lol.

And hey, if you lived in Brazil and couldnt access the wiki's... those geolocation blocks are now gone!

Want to Help the Sentinels Wiki?

For fans of Sentinels (as this is crossposted) if you want to help out - Im (very very very slowly) trying to update the wiki to be character oriented rather than game oriented, as the world of sentinels is so much bigger than any one game. Part of that has been a new layout (You can see it in work on Absolute Zero and Akash and few others) and part of that has been organizing and cataloging cards in a way that will be *much* better for all things regarding referencing them across t he entire wiki.

But with thousands of cards to convert, i wasn't about to do that by hand so I built a bot that does it for me. And.... well the card lists were not exactly always formatted 100% the same so sometimes it makes mistakes. As such, pages touched by the bot are tagged with this category: https://sentinelswiki.com/index.php/Category:Needs_Review_after_Bot

if you are bored and want to double check cards, feel free to. Send me a PM here or in the Discord (im lynkfox in the Realm of Discord server) with cards you've reviewed and any mistakes youve found and ill get them cleaned up off that list.

Or don't, I'm not your mom. I can't make you clean ~~my room~~ the website for me. 😁

The Future, with changes in who owns things.

SO. The big thing - the future. Whats happening?

So when I started the Sentinels wiki way back when, like a decade ago, and soon after the Spirit Island Wiki, Paul and GTG eventually reached out to me to make it "official" and helped pay for the site. That relationship continued through the years, even after the acquisition by Flat River Games. Even after shutting them down, FRG still paid the invoice for the sites.

I have reached out to Paul and GTG but haven't heard back yet - to be fair i reached out literally as they were coming back from Gencon and I'm not even 100% certain the email address i used worked. I need to get on that and send a follow up, cc'd to the general contact 😛

But regardless of the decision they make, the wiki's (Both) will continue to exist. 10 years ago i was barely making a living as a cook and hosting, while definitely cheaper than it is now, was still a huge deal for them to take it over

These days I'm much more fortunate in life and job and such and its not a burden (tho I most certainly do not mind being reimbursed lol) so regardless the Wiki's will continue.

As for Spirit Island, i need to reach out to eric as well and talk about how / what he wants to do to handle this. Again, not expecting reimbursement here - especially from eric - but it is his IP and and he gets the majority vote in this.

Anywho ... take care

Thats it for me. Take care all, keep on kicking colonists and villians butts.

Discovered this game last week, worked through the campaign and am now doing the mandates. I love factory games, and the combination of factory style + management + pathing is a blast.

What are your "unethical" strategies?

Ill start

1. When dealing with Saints in a waiting queue, i often use a Secretariat imp with all the traits that give bonuses on soft and critical failures, and reduced work time. She is often an absolutely horrible imp for any other purposes, and ends up voiding dozens if not more souls in a playthrough, but she generates a lot of cash! I tend to also put her booth near a fear river to reduce her motivation even more so she's even slower. More time spent in the queue = more patience removed. combined with some birth rate bonuses and the voided souls are not a problem

2. once I unlock the Imp Bongo Club or the Administrators Museum, I start picking up imp traits for reduced work time - which means more breaks. Which means more money/faith. Make those imps into productive resources as well as soul processors!

edit:

thought of another

3. Trapping souls in an loop of Hellpuppet/upgraded buildings until they become a deviant due to the general area corruption of Hell itself, then sending them to the specialists - works best if your hellscape is too effective and your overworld is too safe so you arent getting enough souls (of course you could just go make sure you get more :P)