2026-07-13 On the closing of open searchable sites around OSS projects
Recently, I tried looking up a particular package on freshports.org which for as long as I can remember allowed open searching of its package index. Looks like quietly trying to search freshports now requires a login which while disappointing is understandable considering the current issues [1] of OSS project resources being heavily hit by what appears to be LLM agent driven queries.
This makes me sad to see the closing of features that used to be available but due to continued abuse, negligence and general apathy to services that kind people (thanks dvl btw) offer freely to the internet and instead find that the interest they are getting is not the type of attention they were hoping to attract.
I had been slowly building tools (ex. [2]) to help query freshports and other FreeBSD resources from the CLI however as this functionality now requires authentication I have decided to pause adding anything more.
While adding authentication does not look that difficult to implement when thinking about this (quiet) change in policy my guess is that it is in order to deal with undesired traffic. Adding such capability might lead to more reckless scraping behavior which leads to me to conclude that I should just archive the project.
There are plenty of other ways to find the information I was looking for (such as querying a ports checkout) however it is sad to see abuse closing off other avenues to query for packages. (monocultures...)
While freshports package search going login-only is FreeBSD specific, other OSS projects are also dealing with this push and pull on what to keep open and what to close as well. This has lead to the adoption of tools like anubis to mitigate abuse.
Watching from the sidelines it seems like this battle / war is not being won and just throwing even more javascript requirements just to look at a website these days.
With every passing day the net effect of this cat and mouse game is that Javascript sure looks like it is becoming the oil of the internet.