dw_maintenance | Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

Threaded | Flat

oh you LOVE to see it

It amazes me how easy it is to spot here 2 out of 26 comments that were posted by russians. And both are even not from war supporting crowd.

Thank you for everything.

I wish you were free speech absolutists, because all alternatives are worse.

As a survivor, thank you so much for this.

Thank you so much for this.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for doing the right thing. Tolerating threats and intimidation doesn't protect free speech, it destroys it. It's very revealing that Cloudflare's defenders are deeply concerned about the rights of bullies and stalkers, but not for the people harassed into silence (or worse) by said stalking and bullying. Good on you for sticking to your principles, and I hope the move goes smoothly.

THANK YOU for making this decision, and I hope the transition over goes smoothly!

Thank y'all for being principled. More than happy to put up with a few hiccups in the name of right action.

(screened comment) (Show 2 comments)

If there's ever a time for us as a site to collectively suck it up for the good of humanity, now is the time.

One of the things I've always respected about this site is that it's very aware of its clientele and that a lot of what we involve ourselves in is fiction. That we have a safe space to write and play out things that are all fake, or to write about things that we need to deal with in a format that doesn't hurt anyone. No ad sponsors to placate with content and I've always appreciated that from the beginning, there was no hooking up with paypal because of their insistence on censorship. It may have been hella inconvenient and I may have had to cross my fingers and send in money orders from Canada and hope they got to you guys instead of going through paypal (until I wised up and got my banking crap together), but I still appreciated why it was inconvenient and I agreed with it and sucked it up.

This is another one of those times. Inconvenient? In the grand scheme of things, I'm not in the middle of a so many horrible things happening in the world at this moment, so having site outages for a few days because you need to adapt and move away from a toxic partnership is the least of my worries. I can live with inconvenience. I know you're doing it for the right reasons and I hope most if not all of the site is behind your decision. It's a good one. And it's a right one.

Thank you so much for this!

These sound like good reasons to seek other options, so thank your that and the heads up!

Just read the blog post, and honestly I'm very confused. From what I just read, Cloudflare's post says they terminate all services to anything illegal, specifically including CP. I do not have the guts to google the necessary search terms to find out, so... Did one of the sites they mentioned regretting actually contain CP? Did someone misread something?

I mean, "we don't like patronizing a company that does business with neonazis" is not exactly an unreasonable stance to take, so it doesn't change the main message of this post. I'm just very, very confused.

Good.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post
♥ ♥ ♥ Thank you so much!

I admit I haven't been around a lot these past years, but THANK YOU for standing up for DW's principles and beliefs. It restores a little bit of my faith in humanity.