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.
MichaelWhen 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.
There's a realistic situation where this problem is somewhat un-winnable, but in the face of it, winning still needs to be attempted. We have to try.
But when people complain, I always feel they forget the miracle that the place is even up.
Kevin Payravi@textfiles Appreciate all you do!
Kinetix 
@textfiles I wonder how many full time positions it would take to discover the source(s) and have them shut down, or even better, prosecuted.
Sierra PR, "Botfly Mother"
Cindy@textfiles I feel like some sort of a screening system for uploaders should be put into place, not exactly captcha (not a big fan) but a similar concept.
@cnd Any screening system past the basics (virus checking, making sure they upload a PDF that is actually a PDF) confounds the users and stops the abusers not a whit, that's definitely the case.
Johan Wärlander 🦀@textfiles
The archive is an amazing resource. It would probably help to set expectations if there were some kind of "weather forecast" that showed up in the page header or something, and indicated the current level of malicious activity you have to deal with on your end.
On the other hand, there's obviously a risk that it becomes yet another chore to keep it updated, unless it can be automated in a sensible way.
@jwarlander We used to have them.
They used them to see how effective they were in attacks. So they're gone.
@textfiles
Ugh, of course.. Yeah, I can understand that decision.
Ugh, of course.. Yeah, I can understand that decision.
Pseudo NymLike the volunteer archive team to add legit content, is there any thing volunteers can do to help mitigate the abuse?
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.
Russian warship go **** yourself 
@textfiles I’ve always been astounded at how fast it is honestly