I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this happen on the Wiki as well, so maybe this isn’t the right place for it, but fairly regularly when accessing the forum, my browser gets briefly redirected to a page saying:
To ensure an evenly smooth experience for our users, our systems found it necessary to hold your request for the duration of a proof-of-work challenge.
With a cute drawing of what appears to be a lizard chewing a pencil. Hard to be sure because it’s only on screen for a second or two.
I’m presuming this is bot/DoS mitigation. It’s not particularly disruptive and the lizard is cute so I don’t mind it, but I’m just curious if this is something normal that everybody sees fairly regularly or if something about my environment makes me suspicious in the eyes of bot detection services.
For the record, I’m accessing the forum using Firefox on a Tumbleweed installation, accessing from Japan without a VPN.
The only thing I can think that might be the reason is that my provider uses MAP-E for ipv6 over ipv4, so I have to share my IP address with other users. I suppose if a bad actor is using the same IP address then there’s not much I can do apart from changing ISPs.
Like I said, it’s not something that upsets me enough to require a solution, I’m just curious about what’s going on and how common it is for other users. Search results don’t turn up any hits on the forum or in the wiki.
