My understand is its disabled to help mitigate DDOS attack however its not been re-enabled. I think though that’s its a big part of what beltchecker was meant to do. Allowing people who are signing up to schools / classes or competing to see if you are verified or not. I suspect there is still a reason why it has not been re-enabled.

We might be able to mitigate the DDOS attack by how the data is loaded and how much info is shown, with a sign up to see more info.
If we ran a nightly task to produce a PNG image with the data baked in and threw it behind a https://nginxproxymanager.com/ I suspect mitigate the load to a large extent.

That all takes time though setup though.

I mean, isn't cloudflare enough? They have a toggle you can flip during a ddos attack and it puts a human captcha up. They also have some advanced caching tools that seems like they would help iirc.

A PNG of the profiles (like a screenshot...?) seems like an odd choice to me. Generating a static HTML page for profiles once per edit and making those the public facing page for non-logged-in users seems like a fairly basic task with an overall lower load.

The PNG would be good for embedding etc.

It's coming back quite soon 🙂