How my side project got banned from the internet
98 points by fanf
98 points by fanf
that's crazy and super frustrating. 302 redirects are pretty much bog standard all over the internet. Auto flagging you for that is nuts. And having to ask for a human is such an annoying new thing.
I can kinda see it if it goes to a different domain. But a subdomain? Really?
It's not clear to me that the 302 was the reason why his site got flagged. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. It seems like "302 redirects are bad" is folklore. The only feedback he got from Google was "Social engineering content detected on engramma.dev." No idea what caused that, but it doesn't sound like "we don't like your redirect."
The point is google flagged the domain 3 times and stopped only when I removed this redirect. So of course it is still just a guess but redirect was the only controversal thing in the app setup.
Still scares me how much control one company has over this kind of thing.
This is the same kind of shit they did to enclose email and make it a Herculean trial to self host it.
And now between this, aggressive DDOSing AI scrapers, and the shit AI companies are doing to hardware prices, it’s like we’re headed to a world where nobody is allowed to manage their own websites or internet services.
Add age/id verification requirements for any site that hosts user-submitted content (not there yet, but getting there).
It's interesting to see how a dozen companies all implement their own algos that together form an obvious herd mentality, with the lead wildebeest of the herd being Google. It makes you wonder what the other 11 even exist for, if all they're doing is scraping each other (starting with Google). It's like AI slop, without the AI.
good story, and so much time waisted..
I wonder if there is a proxy to sort out all security providers at once instead of going from them one by one
Not really similar but a couple years ago i bought the domain super-youtube.com bc i thought it was funny, and had to abandon it because chrome automatically put up a phishing warning for the site bc the domain name contained youtube
So... we can only freely host a Gemini site (I mean the protocol, not the Google service) now?
If my personal blog was blocked like this, I don't think I'd put up the effort to contact all these bots to get it unblocked, especially since I have to expect that this happens again next week.
Btw. another story about a website that was blocked by Google for unknown reasons: https://www.0xsid.com/blog/online-tld-is-pain . If Kafka lived today, "The Block" would be one of his stories.
Strange no lawyer ever reviewed that text. I mean if it happened tome for my site I would hire a UK lawer the next dayand sue for laible.
I wonder if this would have happened with another, semantically permanent, redirect code like 301 or 308?
Permanent redirects are a very bad idea because (for example) this author would not be able to add a nice landing page later on if they decide it’s worthwhile. Redirects are easy to get wrong and permanent redirects are impossible to fix.
permanent redirects are impossible to fix
Not always: if a client has a cached permanent redirect from A to B, and B then redirects to A, the client should uncache the A→B redirect and try again. Can’t remember where and can’t look for it now, but it was definitely mentioned in some spec somewhere.
Caches don't last forever, so I would consider "impossible to fix" a great overstatement of the issue.
Anyways, that wasn't a suggestions that a permanent redirect should have been used, just wondering about what exactly is the heuristic at play here. Is it just "abusing redirects", or is it "temporary redirect used permanently"?