Notice on Recent Downtime + Introducing "Gaen"

Hello everyone!

Recently, we had hours of downtime yesterday (March 16) and today (March 17) and some slowdowns last week. Basically, the server was suffering from storage performance issues. I talked to the hosting provider about it and we got it fixed. Hopefully we don't run into issues like that again (or soon at least).

We also had downtime around 1 month ago which was caused by really aggressive web scrapers which should be fixed by now. I blocked their ASN and I started blocking AI bots too. Other Lemmy instances have been affected by the same scrapers too.

There might be a bit more downtime during the next few days as I make a few changes to the way I do backups. It should only be a few minutes though.

Lastly, I'd like to introduce @Gaen@ani.social - a kind of AutoMod that should take care of spam. If you've been on Lemmy for a long time already, Gaen shouldn't remove your posts/comments or ban you. If you think Gaen made a mistake, you can send me an email: help@ani.social.

Occasionally it might send you messages if you've forgotten to mark a post as NSFW, but I'm still testing this. I'm also looking into a way to remove the "Nicole spam" with her.

Gaen is named after Gaen Izuko from the Monogatari Series because she claims to "know everything".

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. :D