Pinboard Walls Up For the Moment
Someone’s hyperactive spider got loose.
Clearly the radio silence on this one means that perhaps I am the only one who is affected here. Many of my personal link-hunting escapades begin on the Pinboard tag and user pages – those pages have been closed to the public for the past week, requiring a login to access.[1]
Pinboard: User+tag pages will remain limited to logged-in users only because someone is trying to do a distributed crawl of Pinboard at about 40 queries per second. They didn’t even buy me dinner first
I asked if this was a permanent change and got a quick reply:
I don’t like it, but right now it’s my only defense against heavy distributed crawling.
I’m going to take the phrase ‘right now’ as an indicator that this is a brief manuevre.
Logins for Pinboard are $22/year - very reasonable - a small fee to pay for the wealth of information within. But would be sad to see such a gift to the Web forced into a hole. (Especially since we recently saw some activity on twin site Delicious, after nearly ten years in a hole of its own.)
At the same time, I’m surprised there are no Pinboard-like sites in the Fediverse. There are ‘link-sharing’ sites, but they’re all more like Reddit.
Happily, the RSS feeds are still up. (Sssssh! Let’s not jinx it!) Sample URL: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:chiptune ↩︎
