A bit of adminmistrivia

October 22, 2026

A few changes have been happening around here or will shortly happen.

Facebook

For some time I have been unable to post anything to the Oberon Matters Facebook page. When I try I get the following notification:

I have done what is supposed to be the verify process but nothing changed. By the way, when I opened the app on my phone there were no instructions. I eventually managed to find what I think they were asking for but it didn't make any difference. I have given feedback many times.

Interestingly, one of the things I mentioned in one of the feedbacks was that the "let us know" link went to a nonexistent web page. They managed to fix that. Here is what the notification used to look like.

All of this might be moot anyway, because there are rumours that Facebook will soon be restricting the number of links that anyone can post each month to two unless payment is made to Facebook. When I looked they were asking for about $A80 per month to remove the restriction. As I only use the Oberon Matters Facebook page to link to the weekly updates of the web site and I'm not about to pay anything, the Facebook page will essentially become useless

AI parasites

A short while ago the company that hosts the Oberon Matters web site changed the server software from Apache to Nginx. As part of the changeover they configured the server to block many (but not all) AI scavengers from accessing anything. This resulted in a drop of about 12,000 unique visitors each month. Some are still getting through but I've taken steps to restrict their ability to steal the words and images published here. What I can do is limited and relies on the AI TheftBots™ doing what is requested. I'd like to do more but that would mean modifying the server configuration, something which I'm quite reasonably not allowed to do.

The short version is that I can't stop them coming but I might be able to stop them stealing content.

And here's the interesting part. As more places block AI crawler access, training the LLM models will increasingly rely on looking at AI generated material, making the output even more useless than much of it is at present.