504 Gateway Time-out

504 Gateway Time-out is what I now see, not every time but every few times, when I try to click over to read a node on Everything2.

I don't know why this is happening, or if it is just to me, or everybody else (or some subset of everybody else).

Perhaps this is simply the Internet's idea of a joke on me.

Or the beginning of an abandoned haiku.

This is happening because the various AI/LLM content scrapers are overloading our relatively frugal self-supporting hosting environment. jaybonci has enabled some protections against the worst offenders, but most of the AI trainers utterly ignore robots.txt and it's difficult to manage the traffic. E2 has historically had a fairly high Google pagerank for a lot of relatively popular search terms, and as a result it's a natural target for this kind of abusive crap.