If you’ve become used to scouring XWord Info without an account, you may have noticed that it’s become harder to do that.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Blame hackers. For some reason, XWord Info has recently become a target of several bots from all over the world determined to screen scrape every page. There are well over a million pages, so this bombardment has caused the site to slow down and even crash several times.
In the past, I’ve tried to identify each bot and figure out some way to prevent them from doing damage. As the hackers get trickier and more numerous, I can no longer keep up. My latest solution is to deny the bots free access to most pages they’re interested in.
Unfortunately, that also denies freeloading humans.
The 45 most recent NYT crosswords are still available for free. You can still freely link to my site from your blog, reddit, or Facebook. Let me know if you’d like to link in from your site and I’ll grant access.
If you care about XWord Info, please consider supporting the site by purchasing an account.
Thanks.
Jim Horne