The forum has been experiencing a heavy bot attack, so our tech guy temporarily enabled Cloudflare protection to keep the site secure. That's why you've been seeing a brief verification screen before entering. Sorry for not mentioning it earlier.
Ski Forums and AI
- Thread starter jamesdeluxe
- Start date
And apparently the bot attack has calmed down so the verification screen has been taken down. If you see that screen in the future, now you know why!
There was a brief period yesterday morning when FTO was down. James being in the East saw it first and notified Xenforo Marc.
EMSC
Well-known member
I believe it is looking for "human behavior" from your mouse. AI and other hacker software tends to move a mouse in a perfectly straight line or even jump instantly from one spot to the next on a screen. Humans even if 'not moving' the mouse tend to move it at least a small, nearly imperceptible amount in a non-straight line.
You didn't see a "click here" box? That's what I saw on my laptop screen.
I dont think so. I seem to recall it automatically moving forward after a short delay.
ChrisC
Well-known member
I am always amazed by the number of bots/crawlers here in the last couple of years:
Total: 29,143 (members: 3, guests: 29,140)
That's why Influencers, direct-to-consumer product marketers, etc. now need to come to forums/expert sites to create content that AI bots can pick up in search results.
For example, Google's AI results regarding ski helmets are all from Gear Junkie
I have seen First Tracks and NYSkiBlog referenced in ChatGPT or Claude responses on certain ski-related topics.
Total: 29,143 (members: 3, guests: 29,140)
That's why Influencers, direct-to-consumer product marketers, etc. now need to come to forums/expert sites to create content that AI bots can pick up in search results.
For example, Google's AI results regarding ski helmets are all from Gear Junkie
I have seen First Tracks and NYSkiBlog referenced in ChatGPT or Claude responses on certain ski-related topics.
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Tony's trip reports and info from bestsnow.net are constantly being referenced. The bots recognize a kindred spirit -- relentlessly searching for defensible data!
I just checked and "only" approx. 10K bots/crawlers are identified, as opposed to 29K noted by ChrisC. A light day!
A possibly naive question: is it necessarily bad that forum content is scraped and then included in AI results? As mentioned above, when I requested info about a ski area that I hadn't visited, Chat included hyperlink footnotes and also credited in quoted text the full screen name of two different FTO members who posted the descriptions, thus allowing the user to click through to the actual report or post. Not trying to be an AI apologist but just curious what people think.
Depends on what is the financial basis for keeping an online forum afloat. Forum software and the server hardware required to maintain an online forum cost money. If all the content is available from a Google AI Summary, then a casual reader would have no reason to get involved in a ski forum. Or any other type of social media that requires clicks on advertising or money from a subscription or money that is a donation.
The large Aussie ski forum that's been around since the mid-1990s went to a subscription model a while back. The Admin and co-founder is an expert in both the tech side of forum software and very aware of the every changing social media situation. That forum is very active. The community discusses life in general all year long, not just snowsports related topics. The Aussies talk about skiing on other continents besides Australia all the time. Some actively plan their ski trips overseas two years in advance.
Here what Richard posted in reaction to this article:
August 30, 2026
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
theconversation.com
By Richard, Admin of ski.com .au, posted September 2, 2026:
"From the article.
But if AI tools no longer provide web traffic, it cuts content creators out of the economic loop. There are also other costs associated with each visit to a website, so AI crawling can cost website providers money while not giving them any of the ad or other revenue that would come from human traffic. AI crawlers also crawl more deeply and more intensely than traditional web crawlers, magnifying that cost.
This pretty much sums up everything that has been happening to these forums the last 6~8 months. IF we did not have a subs-based approach, we would be dead in the water."
I for one, have completed the transition some time ago from thinking about how I can best serve 'visitors' to this site - to how can I best serve 'paying registered members'. 'Guests' have zero value and there is no point catering to them anymore. 'www' is a wasteland, a case study in 'tragedy of the commons' and a protocol on the wane."
So the silver bullet is allowing access only to members (who pay a fee, even $1?) and/or putting up the Cloudflare shield?
Using Cloudflare is becoming standard practice on Xenforo forums as far as I can tell.
Moving to a subscription-only approach based on a small annual fee is less common. Richard has been running the Aussie ski forum and website since the 1990s. He's used assorted approaches over the decades as the situation on the Internet has evolved. The top annual fee is around $30. Most of the members are Australians.
The online ski forums that have Admins or Owners who are IT techs are usually quicker to shift as needed. The most protected ski forum I know is DCSki. That's because the Founder/Admin wrote the software from scratch . . . three major versions. Scott is always tweaking the software. Even more so now that he's retired from his day job in high level tech. Also helps that it's a small regional community that's been around for decades.
ChrisC
Well-known member
I just saw some of our conversations scraped and referenced in South America or Europe within 48 hours. When ChatGPT or Claude - sometimes Gemini - references me, ChrisC, what I wrote, as a response and tells me how interesting and insightful my line of questioning is....I worry about the circularity. I need to add instructions to my accounts: don't reference me in searches about skiing.
Almost like Nvidia investing in companies to buy its chips, or turning its GPUs into loan collateral. Becomes Nvidia revenue. Becomes very circular. Worrisome. Nvidia is almost too big to fail by now.
Does adding instructions not to reference your screen name actually work? If yes, will it simply say "there's an interesting and insightful discussion about the good, bad, and ugly of Telluride ski resort on First Tracks Online. One well-informed poster feels that [fill in the blank]"?
I should break out the "AI and ski forums" discussion as it's a compelling topic on its own beyond the issue of defending against a bot attack.
FWIW "now" is defined as last 60 minutes.
If you want a growing community, you want the forum to be discovered through search.
Yeah, but what about the circularity?
jimk
Well-known member
I will attach a link to a discussion on DCSki by owner/admin Scott Smith and others. Essentially, he describes the threat of AI Bot data scraping very much like the discussion by Richard of ski.com.au above. The AI bots steal info from independent websites without giving them any ad or other revenue that would come from human traffic. LINK.Depends on what is the financial basis for keeping an online forum afloat. Forum software and the server hardware required to maintain an online forum cost money. If all the content is available from a Google AI Summary, then a casual reader would have no reason to get involved in a ski forum. Or any other type of social media that requires clicks on advertising or money from a subscription or money that is a donation.
The large Aussie ski forum that's been around since the mid-1990s went to a subscription model a while back. The Admin and co-founder is an expert in both the tech side of forum software and very aware of the every changing social media situation. That forum is very active. The community discusses life in general all year long, not just snowsports related topics. The Aussies talk about skiing on other continents besides Australia all the time. Some actively plan their ski trips overseas two years in advance.
Here what Richard posted in reaction to this article:
August 30, 2026
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI – and reliable information is getting harder to find
AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.
By Richard, Admin of ski.com .au, posted September 2, 2026:
"From the article.
But if AI tools no longer provide web traffic, it cuts content creators out of the economic loop. There are also other costs associated with each visit to a website, so AI crawling can cost website providers money while not giving them any of the ad or other revenue that would come from human traffic. AI crawlers also crawl more deeply and more intensely than traditional web crawlers, magnifying that cost.
This pretty much sums up everything that has been happening to these forums the last 6~8 months. IF we did not have a subs-based approach, we would be dead in the water."
I for one, have completed the transition some time ago from thinking about how I can best serve 'visitors' to this site - to how can I best serve 'paying registered members'. 'Guests' have zero value and there is no point catering to them anymore. 'www' is a wasteland, a case study in 'tragedy of the commons' and a protocol on the wane."
Here are a few excerpts from Scott's posts in the linked discussion. Page views show dramatic growth at times, but it's not a healthy growth.
"More recently, independent publishers have faced another challenge: large-scale AI scraping. Some bots now request tens of thousands of pages per day from DCSki, incorporating our original reporting and forum content into their models. While DCSki content is sometimes credited, there is no revenue-sharing mechanism. When readers visit DCSki directly, advertising provides at least some support. When content is consumed elsewhere, it does not."
"But a lot of that growth (and certainly the "spikes" you see - some exceeding 100,000 page view requests per day) are simply AI bots scraping every character of text off every page. Despite that sudden and continuous surge, I've seen traditional advertising revenue (e.g., from Google AdSense) go down, because AI bots don't view ads."
"But ultimately, it will be a problem if/when independent sites and human journalists disappear. Because AI can only provide answers for what it's trained on. Some of those answers might be "evergreen" (how many ounces are in a gallon?), but for anything that's evolving and changing, they need to keep scraping and training on new data. If there's no motivation for humans to produce that new data, AI results will become stale and outdated and incomplete."