Just to confirm that, due to the continued, relentless, destructive effects of AI bots making excessive requests on the site, we have now switched all Public projects to be Internal and users can now only set their projects to Private or Internal. Note that “Internal” is still effectively public to all registered users, but requires registration on the site to get access. Further details here
Combined with our restriction that users must have an email address from a research institution, this limits access to people that we reasonably believe to be behavioural science researchers of some sort.
We understand that this will have the downside that students, and casual users, will now need to create an account, and that may impact certain teaching environments, so please be aware of this as you prepare teaching materials for next year.
We didn’t want to take this action, and spent several weeks trying to find other ways of limiting the bots while keeping projects fully public, but we have been unable to find a solution that keeps them out reliably for a prolonged period.
We are sad that, in the modern world, these sorts of measures are necessary. We were similarly sad at taking 2 years ago when we took the similar step of limiting access to certain email domains, such as universities, which was the result of relentless spamming of the site with adverts and links.
Maybe one day the world will become a nicer, more respectful place, with fewer malicious and selfish actors. I’m not holding my breath but, in the meantime, we’ll continue protecting your site, your data, and your access, for genuine use, to each threat as it arises.
Best wishes,
Jon