This article is for day 18 of the 伺か・伺的 [第1会場] Advent Calendar 2025 (Ukagaka/Ukagaka-like Advent Calendar 2025 [Venue #1]). Yesterday's article was by 笙はくさむのぶもりさん, and was a collection of tips and tricks for developers. Today, I would like to announce the opening of a new forum, and discuss a certain troubling event that has taken place along the way.
(Note: you may notice that I (Zichqec) am posting this on a different site from usual, and that there is not much styling here currently. I will cover the reasons why in my article tomorrow!)
I am pleased to announce the grand opening of the Ukagaka Dream Team Forum! It is a forum we are hosting on our domain where you can discuss ukagaka.
Currently, it is still a work in progress. It is functional and ready for use, but there are various materials we are still preparing, such as an icon and various informational posts. We will be working on improving it over the coming months; feedback is welcome as this new resource takes shape!
Languages other than English are welcome, and the forum's interface is also available in Japanese to some extent.
We are planning to cross-post community announcements and event announcements there, so you won't need to be a part of our Discord server to get those announcements.
The idea of having our own forum has been something we thought about idly for a few years, but did not expect to seriously pursue for a long time. However, this year the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act came into effect, and with it came several concerning changes to various large services.
I don't want to get into the details and drag the mood down too much, but suffice to say there are a lot of privacy concerns when it comes to using Discord and other large platforms right now. Plus, we are generally tired of being beholden to the whims of giant platforms that aren't concerned with the best interests of our community and its users. So, we are setting up our own independent space.
Even if it does not have much activity for a while, it will act as a fallback option in hard times. We are hoping that it will bring about a few other benefits as well:
Unlike a Discord server, anyone can look at the posts on the forum (except a few private categories) without needing to be a member. This makes the information much more widely available.
When answering questions in Discord, the answers are swept away into the server's backlog after a short period of time. In a forum format, it should be easier to find answers to common questions, reducing the amount of time we have to spend answering them.
Users who do not like instant messaging or find it difficult to keep up with might find a forum nicer to participate on.
I am hopeful that in a few years we will start to see our efforts bear fruit. It remains to be seen what sort of activity level the forum will get, though!
The above sections were going to be the entirety of this article, but due to recent events I do have to address one more thing. Starting on December 13th, we started experiencing a massive slowdown on the Ukagaka Dream Team Wiki. We've had periodic slowness before, but this was to the point where at its worst, some pages were taking more than 150 seconds to load.
After investigating, I found the reason is that the Ukagaka Dream Team Wiki is being relentlessly attacked by bots, very likely scraper bots gathering data to train LLMs or other AI models. I have tried to put various measures in place to defend against these attacks, but unfortunately, since we are on a shared hosting plan there aren't that many options available.
Currently, there are two changes you might notice on the wiki. Logged-out users no longer have access to the media manager, and there is now a bot check that you may be prompted to click sometimes. These measures seem to be reducing the load, but the bots are still making hundreds of requests a minute, so the speed is still fluctuating.
The main reason I bring it up here is that this affects the forum too! Even though this attack is concentrated on the wiki, they are both hosted on the same plan, so this slowdown also affects the forum by proxy.
The timing of this is really unfortunate. We're just launching the forum, and many users may have the first impression that it is slow... I can assure you that when there are not bots attacking, the forum runs very quickly. The forum software we use is very lightweight and efficient.
I will continue to search for solutions to mitigate the bot attacks. In the meantime, if the forum or wiki are running slowly, that is the reason why. Sorry for any inconvenience! Your patience is appreciated as we try to weather this storm.
That's all I have to say about this launch for now. We hope you will come and have a look around the new forum!
Tomorrow's article will be a summary of the activity in the Ukagaka Dream Team this year. Please look forward to it!