This week, Gensokyo Radio turned 14 years old, plus we spent some time focusing on enforcement of our terms of service. For more details, read on.
The most visible part of enforcement likely comes from actions made by our community moderators and staff, and as the Station Manager, I’m incredibly proud of the high standard of quality our community has held itself to for over a decade. When the Discord Partnership program existed, we stuck around for 7 years as one of Discord’s shining examples of a well-kept community, and it resulted in unique opportunities such as piloting the Discord public stages feature in 2021. This is doubly true when we look at Touhou communities across the internet. Clearly we’re doing something right if our group is being invited to conventions and receiving praise from artists for our presence and stance in this unique space.
However, one area that’s less visible is service utilization. Over the years, some fans have taken to using some of our services to make their own projects based on Gensokyo Radio and the information we make available through our website and API. For the most part, our 50,000+ monthly active users have been respectful with how they use our resources, but recently we’ve started to see some bad actors using our resources in ways which are inappropriate. We’ve also seen some activity where there are far more requests to live station info than is reasonable. To this point, we’ve begun blacklisting some bad actors. Here are some examples of bad activity we’ve seen:
- Extraneous and inappropriate form input
- Requests to non-API endpoints for live data
- Lack of backoff by third-party systems when live data is not current
If you have a project which uses our resources, we encourage you to review how your project handles live data requests in various conditions to prevent extraneous traffic or requests needing to be handled by our server. Additionally, to those who are using forms inappropriately: we do not sell data to anyone; please stop flooding our systems with garbage data that is clearly intended to poison LLM training data. You will be blacklisted with no option to appeal.
That’s all for this week! Happy 14th anniversary to Gensokyo Radio, and thanks for listening!
[Knowledge #197]