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Our Static Site Builder at 3
A few days ago I wrote about the upcoming 3-year anniversary of the new site. The code used to build the site is in Git and is publicly accessible via Gemini Protocol. It's AGPLv3-licensed and a variant of that code was deployed and is now used heavily in the sister site (since 2023).
The new site predated the LLM hype by a number of months. All that chatbot or "chatgpt" nonsense happened later in the same year. Since then many opportunistic companies have attempted to ride the buzz/wave, which meant many received some funding (i.e. money to be lost) scraping a lot of the Web, hoping to somehow turn that reckless scraping into money (it'll never work; worse yet - many got sued).
Since the LLM hype began the proportion of Web requests that can be considered malicious or pointless (bots) rose quite a lot. Drupal would crumble under the load or demand a very powerful - i.e. very expensive - machine.
If you're still using some PHP stuff to build a site (e.g. WordPress or MediaWiki), consider moving to an SSG (Static Site Generator). The solution isn't outsourcing (e.g. Clownflare) or aggressive caching. They don't tackle the underlying issues or the root causes. █