Linux Mint Forums are now requiring users to have a login to even browse.

There is apparently a post and discussion thread here [1] but only available to logged in users. Reddit discussion here [2] has conflicting information on whether this is temporary or permanent, and is apparently due to ai bot ddos.

[1] https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2727963#p272796...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/1q2b63t/since_wh...

there are a lot of other linux mint forums out there e.g.

https://www.linux.org/forums/

https://www.linux.org/forums/mint.160/

Maybe it’s to block ai scrapers

Glass half-full kinda take on this: hopefully we'll see a re-think on how we serve content. For things like forums, blogs, etc there's no reason to do work on GETs. You could cache things at reasonable intervals (say 1-5-10min) and serve that, optionally from a CDN. If a user logs in (or pays, or whatever) you can then re-hydrate if needed. Or allow posts and stuff.

Storage is cheap nowadays, caching works, CDNs are a thing and we need to adapt to this new thing. Traffic is gonna increase, agentic "fetching" will grow, and so on. Build for the trends, build better, optimise for your resources. Move stuff to client-side wasm based work, etc. Lots of things to try and see what sticks.