{"id":47892,"date":"2025-05-29T17:26:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T21:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=47892"},"modified":"2025-07-21T13:11:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T17:11:24","slug":"macintouch-paused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/29\/macintouch-paused\/","title":{"rendered":"MacInTouch Paused"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ric Ford<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Website traffic is overwhelmingly dominated now by “bots” executing sophisticated cyberattacks and sucking up every scrap of content; only a tiny fraction of our traffic comes from legitimate human visitors. Unfortunately, these rampant and rising abuses and attacks drive rising server costs, and there’s no practical way to stop them — they originate from networks at Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Tencent, Russia, hosting companies, proxies, and limitless other networks everywhere in the world.<\/p>

I personally need to stop and take a break for a while to re-assess priorities and approaches going forward. I’m putting macintouch.com on pause in an attempt to stem the rising costs, but I’ll note that tidbits.com offers an alternative with similar history and values.<\/p>

I remain enormously grateful for the wonderful support and collaboration of the MacInTouch community over these past decades, regardless of the murky future we’re all facing. Thank you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Miguel Arroz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’ve been following MacInTouch for… decades… I don’t even know any more. Sad to see the site being paused. I’m hoping Ric brings it back sometime in the feature, but whatever his decision is, I’m thankful for many, many years of great content about the Macintosh and Apple.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Same.<\/p>\n\n

Adam Engst<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I understand all too well what he’s going through, and I wish him the best of luck in figuring out his next steps.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Our hosting plans don’t have any visit-based limits so I only worry about bandwidth, and since we use Cloudflare for caching and bot protection, that’s generally not a huge issue. The big win recently was switching to Cloudlflare’s bot prevention to block what could literally be hundreds of spambot-created accounts per day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

I’ve had intermittent problems with bots but so far have been able to avoid adding Cloudflare.<\/p>\n\n

Adam Tow<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When I left The Wall Street Journal in 2014, one of my last tasks was to ensure all the article links remained active<\/a>, even as the front pages redirected to WSJ’s tech section<\/a>. Eleven years later, many of those links still work<\/a>. Some embedded videos are gone, but the core content has largely survived.<\/p>

The same cannot be said (right now) of Macintouch. With its pause, past articles, such as this one<\/a>, now return 404 Page Not Found errors. It’s yet another reminder of the impermanence of the internet. Beloved, long-running sites can vanish overnight, taking decades of knowledge with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

And don’t forget the forums.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n