Can't view Page History anymore

[The Blonde]

@PurpleSerpent

Up until recently I could view the Page History tab of any page without being logged in.

Now it says:
"You do not have permission to view the history of this page, for the following reason:
The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Users."

Is this intentional?
It would seem peculiar, because I can still *edit* pages without being logged in.

(let's ignore the obvious reply "well, create an account then")

 

[DYWYPI]

I believe those settings were changed because unfortunately some miscreant was using illegal methods to try and abuse the 'Recent changes' pages.

 

[Mindos]

I believe those settings were changed because unfortunately some miscreant was using illegal methods to try and abuse the 'Recent changes' pages.

I would like to know more!

 

[The Blonde]

I believe those settings were changed because unfortunately some miscreant was using illegal methods to try and abuse the 'Recent changes' pages.

Thank you, guess it's finally time for me to make an account then.

 

[PurpleSerpent]

Thank you, guess it's finally time for me to make an account then.

I would like to know more!

It's not entirely clear what was going on, but we believe somebody had set up a webcrawler script to regularly fetch every revision of all the pages on the Recent changes list, and the volume of requests was causing the server significant issues. We're still not totally clear if this was a deliberate attempt to DDoS the wiki or just a well-intentioned mistake in a program that was just meant to fetch the Recent Changes list itself, but restricting access to the Recent Changes list was the only way we had available to stop it.

I've contacted the site owner and he's considering removing the restriction at some point in the near future to see if the issue is resolved, but currently you will need to create an account to view the Recent changes list. Apologies for the inconvenience.

 

[DYWYPI]

Yes, illegal regardless. There was lack of due diligence concerning data extraction. Let alone several other unauthorised activities that miscreant was involved in. That's why I couldn't be more specific in the previous post.