A Cavalcade of Updates

January 19, 2025

Some Pinboard updates as we careen forward into the New Year:

I. Return of Public Pages

For the last few months Pinboard has been beset by bot traffic, most of it originating in China. Bots are nothing new, but in the past it was fairly easy to block them by IP address, or user agent string, or some other identifiable feature. The recent crawling is different. It is aggressive, it impersonates normal browser use, and it is spread across tens of thousands of IP addresses, so that normal strategies (like throttling by IP address) don’t work. Nor is it confined to Pinboard—I’ve seen reports from people who run all kinds of sites that the bot problem has been getting vexing.

The problem with bots is that some pages on the site, particularly user+tag pages, are somewhat expensive to generate. To keep bot traffic from bringing down Pinboard entirely, I had to put a number of public pages behind a login. This not only goes against the design of the site (public stuff should be public!), but understandably upset a number of users who rely on the site as a way of sharing links with others.

Last week I added a simple CAPTCHA to the site, so that users without a Pinboard account can once again see public content. If the bots start to outsmart the CAPTCHA, I’ll try other measures. But for now, things seem to be holding.

II. Gift Accounts

You can now give Pinboard gift accounts, at a nice discount to the normal price. Since we’re all a bunch of unsocialized shut-ins, I’ve had a number of people ask if they can give themselves a gift account, to which I have had to answer, no. That is not how gifts work.

You give gifts to other people, not yourself! Pinboard does not believe in self-care.

But I encourage you to share your love of the site by gifting subscriptions to your friends, colleagues, and large extended family.

III. Twitter and Bluesky

People (including myself) loved hooking up Pinboard to archive links in their Twitter feed. But then Twitter (now X) changed the pricing policy on their API to make the cost of integration absolutely prohibitive.

Since then, a number of people have asked if I will add a way to connect Pinboard to Bluesky. I'm open to the idea, but before I do it, I would like to solicit ideas about how such a feature should work.

With the old Twitter integration, you could connect up to three Twitter accounts, and optionally add any links found in your Twitter favorites to your Pinboard bookmark list. Is this how Bluesky integration should work too? Or are there other approaches people would find more useful?

Please send feedback and suggestions support@pinboard.in. Since I don't really use Bluesky, I don't have a good sense of how people are using it, and how that might differ from old Twitter. Please let me know!

—maciej on January 19, 2025