Site Outage

My hubby told me about AI bots taking over low activity forums to socialize. 

 

 

Dead Internet Theory is nigh...

It is truly unsettling.

 

Bruh what am I reading…

A forum where AI agents discuss their pet humans…

2 hours ago, Testament said:

Dead Internet Theory is nigh...

It is truly unsettling.

 

Its genuinely terrifying, especially with current AI advancements, I fear eventually we won't even be able to tell whose human and whose AI,,, I hope mods keep on top of those things here, I'd hate to see the forum overrun by bots 

This, unfortunately, isn't new. I've seen AIs "communicating" with eachother long before that Reddit post.  I think DoA combatted this with the invite system and asking specific hobby related questions ("What is your favorite doll? ") but I understand not wanting to implement that sort of thing due to overhead and concerns over appearing like a closed, elitist community. That was one of DoA's biggest criticisms. 

I was offline due to personal events, so I missed this. The best case scenario is that there was some system/server maintenance going on that wasn't publicly announced. Sometimes computers just sh-t themselves. It could be a hardware issue, a network issue, random reboot etc, but as I am not involved in the backend (and not a professional sysadmin) I can only give an educated guess. Do we know if the site is running off of a web service, like fandom wikis for example?

 

7 hours ago, Angelpaws said:

Its genuinely terrifying, especially with current AI advancements, I fear eventually we won't even be able to tell whose human and whose AI,,, I hope mods keep on top of those things here, I'd hate to see the forum overrun by bots 

beep boop - I mean, I agree, fellow humans

12 hours ago, Angelpaws said:

Its genuinely terrifying, especially with current AI advancements, I fear eventually we won't even be able to tell whose human and whose AI,,, I hope mods keep on top of those things here, I'd hate to see the forum overrun by bots 

Be very careful whenever an AI advancement is announced:

• If it's an AI company CEO warning of imminent AI takeover it's fear-mongering in the hope of regulatory capture (essentially "ban all AIs except US ones by big companies").
• Some so-called research pieces have a huge amount of humanisation going on, ascribing human behaviour to AIs that smart algorithms are incapable of by design. I've now seen a few pieces where I outright wondered what an expert on extremist sects would think of them, so much the researchers sound like they've been completely brainwashed.
  • It's also very strange that no charges have been filed over hacking in any of the so-called security breaches. If a human hacker uses a non-AI tool to scan for and exploit vulnerabilities they're still passable of prison; there should be no difference if the tool is an AI. No charges implies that the so called "breaches" were not breaches, but agreed experiments with (indirect) human guidance for about all actions by the LLM where the 'research' pieces assign human-like agency.

As for the forum posting and "discussion", remember that what the Big AI companies did was to train their AIs (LLMs) on a huge corpus of data without any pre-filtering (which is stupid for various reasons, not in the least that it makes controlled experiments impossible), basically all of the internet. Besides being a collection of human language, that corpus of data also represents and describes human behaviour, including many, many tutorials on how to do a variety of things. It stands to logic that in the absence of any form of pre-established guardrails limiting the scope of actions a LLM presented with an input form might 'try' things present in a tutorial - really it's just a sequence of most likely tokens in a given situation. In the case of forums, tutorials will likely include links to working instances of forum software, which in many projects is set up in such a way that they link to your particular instance of a forum - thus both providing a pathway for the LLM, and exposing a security risk in that accessible documentation may accidentally provide access to sensitive parts of a system for an automated system to misuse.

The bit that seems to convince quite a few humans that LLMs are intelligent - they're not, it's all statistics - is that the resulting text is human-like, which, given the technology, is 100% what can be expected (see Eliza for a primitive and more obvious example - be nice to Eliza, she's 60 this year😊). What is also likely is that, given the ingested corpus of data, LLMs will 'replicate' human online behaviour. And thus we come to the deleted posts.

 

TL;DR the Computer God will not arise, except in the minds of gullible fools.

 

Disclaimer: I was closely involved with one of the precursor technologies in a previous academic job. That one concerned a technology with which "perfect" definitions of biological traits could be made - a good look at the ingested data suggested to me that it was a dead end that would end up suffering from the same problem as humans, i.e. describing non-binary things is by definition fuzzy. LLMs are basically a different take on the same problem, wanting to have a system that gives the perfect answer to anything, and will suffer the same fate, for the same reason.

Regarding the original topic of the thread: @baldylox @BeyondTime, apologies for the ping but if this hasn't crossed your minds already, you may consider contacting Averis specifically to provide an email they could use to add one or both of you as people delegates (people who have limited access to the web host and/or domain registrar). This option isn't always the easiest to find, but there's generally an option these days for someone to grant this kind of access to specific individuals.

Honestly even if Averis was only comfortable providing read only permissions, I think that would be very helpful? 

Anyway, asking if Averis could do this while providing an email at the same time might allow them to delegate to someone even if they don't have the time to respond and explain what happened.

I figured I'd mention this bc I'm a web dev and have had to dig up this kind of thing many times to have a client give me delegate access or for me to grant it to myself after they casually gave me their passwords lol it's really helpful to have! 

Edited Friday at 08:39 AM by CaffeinatedCake
typooos

13 hours ago, CaffeinatedCake said:

Honestly even if Averis was only comfortable providing read only permissions, I think that would be very helpful? 

I can ask about that. 

I don't know what limitations there are with granting admin access, but when I asked about adding more admins his response seemed to indicate that he had given as much access as he could. It's possible that admins might have access to the payment info or his PII, and we're near-total strangers, so I wouldn't give that out either if I were him.

26 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

but when I asked about adding more admins his response seemed to indicate that he had given as much access as he could.

Was this after the website came back online, and if so, was there any explanation about what happened?

On 9/30/2026 at 11:54 AM, BeyondTime said:

I can ask about that. 

I don't know what limitations there are with granting admin access, but when I asked about adding more admins his response seemed to indicate that he had given as much access as he could. It's possible that admins might have access to the payment info or his PII, and we're near-total strangers, so I wouldn't give that out either if I were him.

I saw a screenshot earlier from when the site was offline that suggested that the forum is hosted with dreamhost, and it looks like they do allow people to delegate access via account privileges... Though if I'm understanding this correctly, the available options might indeed require Averis to be comfortable sharing personal info that many people would NOT be comfortable sharing (for good reason). 

On the other hand, the dolldreaming.com domain appears to be registered through GoDaddy, and their delegation options for the domain can be better finetuned.

At a minimum, the kind of information I expect Averis would need to be comfortable sharing would be first name, last name, maaaybe billing address. It's reasonable if they don't want to share that info with y'all, but hopefully the links are at least a little helpful in sorting that out.

On 9/30/2026 at 9:22 AM, ragnamuffin said:

Was this after the website came back online, and if so, was there any explanation about what happened?

No, this was a few months ago, and I still have not heard anything about that. 
 

 

11 hours ago, BeyondTime said:

No, this was a few months ago, and I still have not heard anything about that. 
 

 

Failed automatic renewal payment by credit card, maybe? If so, that would be another one to add to the list of cases concerning that same period that I've heard of...

21 hours ago, CaffeinatedCake said:

I saw a screenshot earlier from when the site was offline that suggested that the forum is hosted with dreamhost, and it looks like they do allow people to delegate access via account privileges... Though if I'm understanding this correctly, the available options might indeed require Averis to be comfortable sharing personal info that many people would NOT be comfortable sharing (for good reason).

I looked it over and it looks like you can disallow access to billing details. What isn't clear is if it allows transfer of the service to another person if something happened to the primary account holder. I think that's the main thing people are concerned about given what happened to DOA.

It's possible that access to a server / database that the forum runs on would allow transfer of the software and data, but the domain registration could be an issue. A database move to another sql host I could do easily if something happened, but bottom line, it's up to Averis, and I can respect that he might not be comfortable with sharing that access. 

This is very worrisome, partially because there is little to prevent the site from going down in the future if only one person can handle this stuff, and also makes me worried about Averis if he hasn't been reachable for so long. I hope he's okay.