On 8/08/2026 23:24, kurtz le pirate wrote:
> I can no longer connect to Thunderbird to read the news.

Folks,

Apologies for the issue, but web scrapers forced my hand by totally bringing the
system down attempting to scrape the news.povray.org web interface with several
thousand connections per second (!)

There was no clear pattern of IP addresses or other facets I could use to block them
server-side so I had no option but to turn on cloudflare for the news and www sites.

This has resulted in news.povray.org getting a new IP address pointing at cloudflare,
and it doesn't relay or proxy NNTP.

The workaround for now is to either use a new DNS entry I have created -
nntp.povray.org - which points at the real IP address, or to add a new hosts entry to
your system that equates news.povray.org to the IP address 203.29.75.35. This has the
downside that connections to the web view at news.povray.org will no longer work,
since even after I cloaked news.povray.org with cloudflare, I was still seeing
millions of connections direct to the IP address and had to block ingress on port 80
and 443 to cloudflare IP's only.

After posting this message I will give turning off the IP block a test to see if the
direct connections have gone away - by now the scrapers should all have picked up the
new IP address, or so I hope.

Which method you use depends on your NNTP software. Thunderbird allows you to change
the IP without losing your existing cached NG's, content etc, so changing to
nntp.povray.org in the connection settings should work. Other software may require you
to toss your cached data (my iOS newsreader wanted to do this).

At the moment, provided you can use the new IP address, access to port 119 should work
whichever method you employ.

-- Chris

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