HN Explorer

Show HN: A new error message from HN ...

23 points by ColinWright ↗ HN
Checking on some old material to provide some cross-referencing[1] I got this message:

    We've temporarily limited requests for old items.
I've always taken it for granted that HN contained useful information that I'd be able to retrieve whenever I found the need, but this has brought me up short. Perhaps older discussions will eventually become unavailable. Will Google cache still have them? Will the Wayback machine still have them? How convenient will they be to find in the future.

Probably this is a temporary glitch to prevent some overly enthusiastic crawler from bringing the site to a halt, but it just made me wonder.

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[1] Many of you will know that this is an activity I still perform occasionally, although now severely curtailed as compared with how it used to be.

5 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 24.2 ms ] thread
saurik
Six days later, and the message is still happening; this is really depressing. :(
alter8
We can't even request features anymore. The topic linked on the bottom, which was treated specially and kept open for replies, suffers the same problem.

EDIT: the whole problem is gone as I finish posting. HN is back to its former shape. I should <strike> my comment.

esrtbebtse
As I understand it, HN was the subject of a web crawl that was sufficiently agressive that it was effectively a DOS. As a result, access to older items was limited to try to limit the damage.
codegeek
It just happened to me as well.
m0dE
Still happening :(