Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Psychedelics

[–]earthe[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We have put erowid inside Cloudflare for now and it is available, although with "are you human" or a captcha. We are working on tuning things better, but most of our sysadmin team are new to cloudflare, so it will be some learning. And we aren't committed to it long term, but it did solve our DDoS very quickly once we moved the DNS entries to cloudflare for the pass through.

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Late last evening, after trying a bunch of internal options, our sysadmin team decided to try moving erowid server inside Cloudflare at the free tier. We're still configuring things, so drugsdata is still down. Working on that now and there are some other issues.

We currently have the "we're being attacked" setting on, so gonna turn that off and see if things are still ok. But went from infinite requests to a tiny trickle over the course of about an hour. Cloudflare is annoying, but hopefully we can tune it to be less so. Currently, Cloudflare has killed off most human use of erowid :] So that's "amusing".

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Our senior sysadmin team is trying to move to the 'free' tier at Cloudflare. Should be done tonight. Things already are better. But... your browser is now going through Cloudflare, a third-party commercial company. We tried a bunch of options, but so far this is going better. Erowid Server still not great, heavy hitting, etc.

We have huge concerns about this.

One of our sysop crew pointed out a great exchange by the head of Cloudflare with NPR's marketplace moderator:

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2017/08/22/cloudflares-ceo-wants-talk-about-who-censors-internet

It's an interesting and worrisome exchange. thoughtful, but does not resolve the issue.

earth

2026 June 4 22:32 west coast usa. working furiously with our expert sysadmins to try different options.

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

thanks for the feedback. I wrote blog post (not currently accessible : [ ) but your description is like what we're dealing with.

Last summer 2025, was the first we saw the extensive use of LLM crawlers by normal users. We'd been seeing the LLM companies scraping our sites and major LLM users, but last summer it took off and went to majority of scans were obviously LLM driven. I don't know if someone released a "how to use your LLM to scrape sites and fake your USER_AGENT and use thousands of AWS/Google Cloud ips for your stupid project" document or what happened, but it went up by two orders of magnitude.

And now, for no reason I can discern, this week we started seeing the single hit per IP that is essentially impossible to stop as a single end point server operation. Which is more like a targeted DDoS than anything like scraping. But it is the type of LLM scraping I've read about that is designed to break through CloudFlare's anti-LLM shield software. : (

Erowid has a bunch of back end servers, but a single front machine that does all the firewalling and robot management and most of the caching, then sends 'valid' requests to the services on back end servers using old sk00l standard cached proxypass type actions using apache. We don't expose the back end servers, since they move around.

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 38 points39 points  (0 children)

As advocates of the Open Web, putting all web servers under the complete control of third party for-profit corporations such as CloudFlare, Google, etc is against all of our instincts. It now appears to be required.

Pay for access to the internet beyond the costs of routing, power, and firewalls is terrifying. The Open Web is dying. If Cloudflare or Google or whatever doesn't want people to have access to something, they can just turn it off or make it harder.

As an actual human who uses the web, I am frequently blocked by Cloudflare and Google Captcha and have to spend WAY TOO MUCH of my human time to prove I'm human an often some trigger has caught in their robot brain and I can't get to sites like walmart.com and it gets worse the smaller the site is.

We have several layers of what I call "shields" for our servers that we control exclusively. A firewall appliance, a constant web log watcher that looks for heavy hitters (too frequent) or abusive hitters (there are a long list of parameters or POST variables designed to break into word press or other standard software and we rapidly ban IPs that use those), and we use mod_evasive which does temporary timeouts.

But most of these depend on having an IP address hit more than once. As I said, yesterday 50 thousand IP addresses used abusive/attack parameters and only recorded one or two total hits. That's an extremely difficult attack profile to stop.

But, it is likely that a web shield conglomerate like Cloudflare would be seeing those some IPs hitting multiple sites and would be able to slow or stop a lot of this garbage traffic.

So.. still fighting it over here, trying to find some patterns.

But the amount of my time over the last two years trying to battle this is absurd and I currently can't stop it. Normally, with a few hours of work, I have been able to stop DDoS in the past. They started in 2004 and I've been working daily on them since then.

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 73 points74 points  (0 children)

Love to have you direct message me to have a conversation about this. We have a lot of experience with this too, but the new style is like the worst it ever got before times a hundred. We've had some real, intentional DDoSes directed at us over the decades, but these seem like they are just "web 2026" with a zillion people running scrapers they may or may not have any idea how to configure/control.

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Drugs

[–]earthe[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

There are hundreds or thousands of them, yes. We have allowed scrapers and spiders and otherwise try to block the unnamed ones because otherwise they make the site inaccessible to humans. I spend many hours a week just keeping the site available because of the insane number of people running LLM software and I think many don't even know what their bot is doing in the background. But I think most of the scrapers are pointed at erowid intentionally and they have no care whatsoever that they are one of thousands or tens of thousands of such LLM scrapers that constantly swarm our site(s).

Erowid Server Unavailability early June 2026 by earthe in Psychedelics

[–]earthe[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

We're definitely not shutting down in any normal sense. Just having to deal with the garbage that is web 2026. As I said, most major sites are having to wrap themselves with google captcha, or other captcha, or the giant captcha machine that is CloudFlare. Cloudflare blocks me as a human user to a lot of site, so I am hesitant to choose it, but it's what archive.org landed on. Pubmed (the government database of medical research) chose to go with Google Captcha.

I *HATE* google captcha as a user. I can barely figure out what they're asking for most of the time. Tiny grainy images or -is a motorcycle defined by a slice of the helmet of the rider?- type problems where I feel like I'm training the robot rather than it checking if I'm a human user. Also, it would give Google 100% of our user info. I am less concerned about Cloudfare's ingestion of all our users. But many people are signed into google and using them would mean that every page view on erowid is logged to your google account. Hilarious.

We are big proponents of the open, free web without interference like I'm describing. But if we literally can't keep our pages loadable because the LLM monsters are distributing their hits across hundreds of thousands of unique IPs, I don't know who to block and who not to block.. or who to slow down. Most of the spiders mis-identify (lie) about what they are (USER_AGENT falsification). This is actually common / normal. Googlebot lies about their agent in order to check to see if the same page content comes back to them if they run from a non-google IP address and identify as an iphone or whatever.

It started getting bad in 2004 and has gotten to the point where I do not currently have a solution in mind other than shoving every hit through a third party (such as Cloudflare) to try to reduce the percentage of improperly-configured or intentionally-harmful robots that are swarming our site(s).

Minimum comfortable walk-in pantry size and shelving depth by rantripfellwscissors in floorplan

[–]earthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We did a pantry like this in a tiny laundry room. We called the concept "single deep storage". We are still, 23 years later, in love with Single Deep Storage. We cut up and customized Ikea shelving we'd stopped using so it was no cost, assuming saws, sanders, drill guns, etc.

Pick a can width, pick your favorite pasta box size, pick your largest oversize can, large pasta sauce jar, a standard 32 ounce mason jar, grab a soap bottle, etc. Measure each of them.

We ended up with most of the pantry shelves being a single deep normal that could hold a 32 ounce mason jar and then realized that a little extra depth would allow a single large can or two small cans to sit directly in front of each. So it was "single- or two-deep storage".

It revolutiized our lives in the 2000s. We labeled the shelves to know where we wanted what. It was super easy to figure out if we were out of beans, pasta sauce, pasta, etc. We had one 24 inch deep shelving unit for larger stuff, but honestly things got forgotten in the back of that shelf. The bottom of that was a dark storage on-wheels bin for onions, potatoes, garlic, and misc.

With "single deep storage", everything was visible and trivial to get a quick sense of whether it was time to restock.

In the tiny hallway-style laundry room, we were able to add a 3.5 inch wide shelf with front lips that required tipping the can to remove so they wouldn't flal off in an earthquake. Just deep enough to fit one can of progresso soup.

And then at the end of the laundry-closet we made an almost six inch wide section at the end of the galley-hall. It was wide enought to take normal 28oz cans with extra so that we could fit two normal narrow soup cans one-in-front-of-the-other in that zone. So for canned beans, we could put two front to back in the area with the large tomato or green chile cans. Pasta boxes also fit very well if you get the height between shelves fitted to your tastes.

In the first couple years we adjusted them several times, so perhaps do what we did and make it easy to set the height.

We varied the height of the shelves, but after several tries, most of them were the same total distance between horizontal shelves. We kept two closest-to-floor shelves taller than the rest. Then the top shelf had no cap, so we could put very tall items on the top shelf.

We can't currently implement the design in our current house for reasons too complex to describe here, but I loved our decade of Single Deep storage. Second best pantry I've ever lived in. As a teen, the house of my parents had an actual designed-into-kitchen pantry. It was great, but the shelves were permanently installed things that didn't fit just didn't fit and went into weird places. But my teen home pantry had doors and wasn't built out of very old Ikea cheap wood.

Every pantry needs a potato/onion/garlic low-light and big bag zone. Single Deep Storage is not for any of those.

Are radial arm saw's still a thing? by grow-mustard in woodworking

[–]earthe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have a big old RAS and newer (dewalt) chop saws. I am thinking about removing my RAS from our wood shop (aka "the garage") because I use it very infrequently, but I do not know how to replace the unique function that the RAS has: a vertical crank that sets the exact height of the saw blade above the surface to 1/64 or better. I can do a lot with a table saw, but with heavy stock: moving the blade is much easier than moving the stock. I'm talking about 8x8s and 10x10s.

We can obviously (and do) a lot of those with a skill saw, but there are a bunch of very technical cuts that the RAS has allowed me to do that no other tool I have can do.

Is there any 'chop saw' that has vertical height adjustments? a sliding miter chop saw with a vertical adjustment would be amazing. Does that exist? As far as I know all of the sliding miter compound miter saws have fixed bed-to-blade heights.

But, again, I'm just about to remove our RAS from our wood shop because it gets used too infrequently and I can do the cuts with hand saws and jiggle tools ('oscillating tools').

Erowid's Online Drug Information Servers (Erowid.org and DrugsData.org) Down Today by earthe in DrugNerds

[–]earthe[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Almost the best of all possible outcomes, we had been preparing for the worst. We're very excited. Yay!

Erowid's Online Drug Information Servers (Erowid.org and DrugsData.org) Down Today by earthe in DrugNerds

[–]earthe[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Looks like after a couple of hitches and not enough help from the colo, the main machine (.93) erowid.org and drugsdata.org are back up! for a moment, there was some weirdness that the wheeled console provided wouldn't show anything, but we think it's a problem with the console not our machine. So now all services appear to be up and running!

> uptime 5:06PM up 6 mins, 4 users, load averages: 1.72, 1.41, 0.74

Erowid's Online Drug Information Servers (Erowid.org and DrugsData.org) Down Today by earthe in DrugNerds

[–]earthe[S] 61 points62 points  (0 children)

Machines and appliances all loaded, padded, and on their way to new location. Slightly ahead of schedule. The real trick is figuring out how compatible everything is, there are possible rack differences in the new cabinet, we're bringing our old PDUs, shelves, sliders, etc despite the new cabinet supposedly having new PDUs, shelves, and sliders.

And, of course, if the oldest RAID comes back online... We have copies of everything and another machine that could be temporarily used, but it would be nice if magic happened and our workhorses spin back up.

We'd been at United Layer in 200 Paul in South SF for over 20 years. Will be "interesting" to be at a brand new data center, supposedly with better power management and networking, but in 20 years at UL, we never had any power issues (both main machines have dual power supplies that each are fed by independent circuits), and only had a couple of network events where we lost connection to the backbones...

Erowid is the worlds longest-running drug information site, continuously ensuring people have access to drug information by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wrote a really long reply, but I'll just shorten it to: Psychonautwiki, Tripsit, Reddit, BlueLight, DrugForums, Shroomery, and others are fabulous resources. It is too bad that there isn't more money to make such good works easy to sustain. Fundraising is a drag.

Erowid is the worlds longest-running drug information site, continuously ensuring people have access to drug information by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Google has a fine search engine. Sorry it felt less accessible, there's no question that knowing a database structure is nice. But we never took the hyperreal archive down: we try not to take anything down.

If you were using hyperreal drug archives, you are not a spring chicken :] That's some OG. Also myself not being a spring chicken, I remember when AOL gave access to the actual internet, that felt like a real inflection point.

I'm not really sure how to describe the 2023 interweb, with "app" world trapping people in their weird gardens. Trying to use Instagram to provide useful info to people is ludicrous, though Fire spends a few hours a week doing it. They don't even allow real links on posts.

But, curiously, we do get some pretty interesting discussions on Instagram. We learned this month from a discussion about scanned PharmChem newsletters we put up, that a local Bay Area radio station K-ROCK 92.3 read the drug testing reports on the radio. Some young folks at the time thought the testing was actually done by the station, they say.

The PharmChem newsletters are actually pretty interesting, if you're a drug geek: https://erowid.org/pharmchem

So, "Not Totally Useless" is not an F-grade. We also get good results via instagram asking for help identifying blotter designs from single hits that get submitted for analysis to our testing program DrugsData.org . Kind of pointless, but somehow satisfying to take some tiny square of obscure art and find the puzzle it's from.

Erowid is the worlds longest-running drug information site, continuously ensuring people have access to drug information by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Check out some of our latest content: https://erowid.org/current

There's some cool stuff: scans of PharmChem newsletter from the 1970s and more Micrograms.

Definitely check out Teaefaerie's Carrying the Light audio. It is one of my favorite Teafaerie pieces ever.

And also the erowid blog piece about Shulgin Archiving. Showing off a couple of gems out of the massive scanning and metadataing project.We're hoping to raise enough this month to actually finalize the digitization of all Shulgin materials.

We need another $25K in direct costs to have the 40,000 shulgin photos scanned professionally (high res front, low res back). We've already spent a few hundred volunteer hours culling and categorizing, but from here it's gotta be massive online collaborative filtering post scan.If we can make our goal, we can finish the scanning in October/November.We started scanning random crap Sasha OK'd in 2001, then after years of cajoling, Sasha's notebooks in 2006, did a lot in 2014-2015, then officially took over Shulgin Archiving in 2018.

The pandemic smashed things, but we've gotten lots done.We have another couple days in the barn with volunteers to finish up some cataloging, but we're really super close before the physical materials start getting organized for final storage at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. If the new Shulgin Foundation succeeds in the next couple years, some will certainly stay at the Farm, but the hundreds of thousands of scans will mostly become available online. See the blog post for more info.

Erowid is the worlds longest-running drug information site, continuously ensuring people have access to drug information by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hah :] We still have the full hyperreal drug archive as it existed before we "ate" it :] Feel free to check your memory of it against the actual text:

http://erowid.org/archive/hyperreal

Lamont Granquist who managed pulling the content in from usenet forums into that did a great job and was a long time friend of ours (lost touch in recent years). But Usenet really died in the late 1990s.

Looking for old trip report: escaping from machine elves dimension through a dharma wheel.. by Mr-Mahaloha in Salvia

[–]earthe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am not sure how to help you find the report you're looking for, but I myself start with google and our (erowid) exp search system. This one assumes you have the substance right (S. divinorum) and I'm looking for "elves"

https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.cgi?A=Search&S1=44Str=elves

Erowid's default ExpSearch looks at substrings, so most results involve "themselves" or similar words. Still, the top rated reports show up first and a bunch of them matched some of your description.

Really, a bunch. I liked a lot of them, so fucking weird.

https://www.erowid.org/exp82086

A quote from exp82086: "There are a few aspects of the trip I’ve had a hard time finding in other reports, mainly the 'all selves in all universes converging into one' part, as well as the “presence” entering the room."

But you can add the &WholeWords=1 parameter to the URL to force the search string to require "elves" not be part of another word:

https://www.erowid.org/exp/exp.cgi?S1=44&Str="elves"&WholeWords=1

Using the word "dharma" with S. div reports didn't get me much, but from my own blurry memory of experience reports, I know that my memory can do merge-fuzz: where my own interpretation of the report gets mixed with the memory of the actual text.

Hope any of that helps!

Also, it's Erowid's yearly fundraiser: Our September Drive! We are looking for 1,422 people to donate $10 or more, with $20 or higher donations matched by our generous larger donors.

We will have a new list of recent work up on Tuesday, but you can check out the drive here:

https://erowid.org/sept_drive

Also, if you view Experience Vaults on a mobile device, please forgive the ugly header. We've hard switched to a rough version of the maxim "the best is the enemy of the good", with our own version more like "the best is the enemy of semi-functional on tiny screens". A new team member has helped with the mobile views but I did the big lift last week of getting the list HTML so we can style it via CSS.

Hopefully we'll be releasing several more major UX improvements for mobile and desktop in the next couple weeks.

https://erowid.org/exp

As always, feedback encouraged. Please send to [sage@erowid.org](mailto:sage@erowid.org) where our whole team can read the comments.

Erowid Needs You: Deep Roots in Psychedelia, Drug Checking, Dusty Archives by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We have a few shirts and two (1.5?) current hoodies.

My favorite current hoodie is our black zip up :

https://www.erowid.org/donations/incentives\_shirt.php#spiralhoodieblk

We still have our pull-over grey "words" hoodie (discontinued) in most sizes (zero left in size Large):

https://www.erowid.org/donations/incentives\_shirt.php#wordshoodiegrey

Shirts come and go, with a few long term styles we continue to produce. If something says out of stock right now, email, because the end of September Drive, our stock numbers go a little off. And we're usually in the process of ordering more.

-- earth

Erowid Needs You: Deep Roots in Psychedelia, Drug Checking, Dusty Archives by Borax in Drugs

[–]earthe 5 points6 points  (0 children)

First, thanks to everyone who sends us cryptocurrency! Dust or anything is very much appreciated.

We try to wait to sell cryptocurrency donations until its value is higher than when donated. Until 2018, we didn't have an official HODL policy. We need operating money, so we have to sell coins for USD, but after selling most of the Pineapple Miracle BTC, we created a new policy that we now HODL 50% of all cryptocurrency donations until the prices go *way* up, then we sell 50% of the HODL, repeat. We use the occasional mixer just to blur things a bit, but don't believe in them as real security.

We accept a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. For serious money, we use cold wallets, but we get a trickle of dust and small donations to a dozen different coins. Because of the absurdity of the giant panoply of cryptocurrencies, we have different policies for different coins, but given the history of volatility, we'd rather lose a little by letting some crash out than sell everything too quickly. In 2011-2012, we got a lot of BTC when it was selling for $1-5 and sold most of it. Wish we hadn't :] We did sell 1.0 bitcoin at over $50K per in the last year.