Tabletop news portal EN World fights server slowdowns under 90,000 AI bots

Independent tabletop news site EN World is facing severe service disruption after being hit by coordinated waves of up to 90,000 automated bots scraping the website for content. Russ Morrissey, owner and founder of EN World and EN Publishing, alerted the tabletop community via Discord as server capacity buckled under the load.

The attack highlights a growing crisis for independent hobby publishers, who bear escalating hosting and security bills while commercial AIs ingest their work without payment. As automated programming tools lower the technical barrier to deploying scrapers, hobbyist script creators and venture-backed tech platforms continue to crawl specialist outlets to harvest niche data.

Russ Morrissey, owner of EN Publishing, said in a statement:

We are experiencing massive site slowdowns (on EN World) due to waves of up to 90,000 AI bots scraping the site for content. We are working hard to block them, but its hard to keep up on an industrial scale like this. Please be patient–we’ll figure something out!”

Bot Traffic and Asymmetric Server Expenses

Running community message boards and news archives requires substantial bandwidth and memory (trust us, we know!). When tens of thousands of automated crawlers bombard dynamic forum pages simultaneously, database servers exhaust their connection pools and CPU limits. For independent operations like EN World and Geek Native, these surges create immediate financial damage through hosting overage charges and emergency security subscriptions.

Some countermeasures include enterprise mitigation tools like Cloudflare, which provides a growing arsenal of protections, filtering malicious user-agents and throttling suspicious IP clusters before they reach origin servers. Cloudflare has simultaneously pressed mainstream search engines to respect crawl directives and isolate AI scraping activity. However, standard search indexers and automated machine-learning scrapers often share IP ranges and user-agent conventions. Notably, Google still refuses to separate its primary search crawler from its generative model training operations, complicating selective blocking for publishers who need search discoverability to survive.

Google Search Changes and the Data Economy

The surge in automated harvesting has pushed major platforms into defensive manoeuvres of their own that alter the broader web landscape. Over recent months, Google has enacted barriers against scraping by retiring the legacy num=100 URL parameter, which allowed automated scripts to pull 100 search results at once, and routing outgoing search clicks through /url?q= goto redirect scripts.

These countermeasures reflect the vast commercial value placed on indexable web copy and search rankings. Adobe last year agreed to a $1.9bn acquisition of search marketing data platform Semrush, a business built on scanning and indexing Google search results at massive scale. As corporate entities spend billions securing proprietary data pipelines, independent specialist websites serve as unpaid training feedstocks.

Tabletop roleplaying games journalism relies on individual creators, small editorial teams, and active player communities sharing playtest notes, campaign tools, and industry coverage. Readers looking to support EN World through server downtime can participate in the official EN Publishing Discord or support their ongoing operations via Patreon.

Photo by Taiki Ishikawa on Unsplash.