MusicBrainz not reachable using Beets

IvanDobsky · November 19, 2025, 8:11am

Scroll down to the report from Zas in the meeting notes:

Zas:
As many experienced, MB website was very very slow for few days
It was caused by AI bots (ofc)
The question is always the same… how to answer…
So, I went in war mode, coded a bot detector I had in mind since a while
With massive amount of time, new tools (AI-based), I managed to produce something which is actually efficient (for now)

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I deployed a very early version in prod (yes…), the blue vertical line separate before & after
So it worked. But I still have to stabilize the thing. And that’s not really a simple thing: it parses logs in real time, identify suspicious bots, block them using stick tables in haproxy, create reports and stats, and is very tunable (to be able to answer to new threats)
and all blocks are only temporary by design (because they use temporary IPs anyway)
Now, I’m focusing on making this really solid (it isn’t right now), so most of my time is on that
plus few minor tasks, but I worked like 15h a day for few days so…

He is literally fighting a flood of bots using MusicBrainz to acquire knowledge on music. The problem is they work really heavy handed and hammer the site with their bots. It is the same for many websites. They suffer under a barrage of bots overloading the ability of websites to keep up.