gnu.org is bordering on unusable for many months now, and it seems to be getting worse.
If users can't effectively access gnu.org that's it. It's an existential issue for the project. Access issues like this insidiously harm a project in many ways, from developers accessing resources, to users looking up info. gnu.org is ranked 16996 most popular in the world¹, which indicates significant interaction, and thus significant negative interaction currently for users. There is talk of malicious DoS and extra load from AI bots. But any site on the net has to deal with that. Playing whac-a-mole with DoS sources is not practical, so a better solution is needed. I mentioned cloudflare as an option on #fsfsys but was told there was a debate about that, with the decision it impacted user freedoms. Though of course inaccessibility to gnu.org is definitely directly impacting user freedoms. I also mentioned Anubis on IRC, but I understand there are issues with that because of javascript? Developers are less numerous of course, so perhaps we could at least focus on fixes most impactful for users, perhaps reconsidering cloudflare, or using a CDN for files, html docs, mailing list archives etc. thank you, Padraig. ¹ https://www.akamai.com/security-research/akarank
