Jason ScottSpammers run rampant against the archive, trying their best to post advertisements and tricky links outward to sketchy sites. They've been doing it for years, and there's mitigations I and others work to keep it contained and miminal. Recently, someone is trying to break out of containment and is posting literally thousands of items a day.
Tens of thousands of items are being made, with rapidly fluctuating spellings and locations, which I've tracked down to VPN use as well as probably some level of hired hands. I have counterscripts running, but meanwhile, they are uploading hundreds of gigabytes a day and getting it disappearing soon after.
When I see people going "the archive is slow, wah" they just don't realize there's this tsunami of bad actors, either spammers, DDOSers testing their equipment, and fraudsters that want to just grind the whole thing into the ground to make a potential quick buck. I'm flghting them and others are too. But the result is I'll spend a full day and have little to show for it.
Kilroy_Was_HereI was downloading some ebooks yesterday and wondered why it was slow at times. One of them, I had to keep trying several times because the download kept failing. Sorry to hear the cause but glad to know the cause. Hope the attackers go away soon.
I will say that today things have been zippier so whatever you're doing seems to be working, at least for what I'm doing.