[Coda]

Update: I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I'm blocking an incredibly aggressive search engine crawler. The bad news is that this crawler comprises 90+ of the "guests" active at any given time, so it's going to look like our activity is suddenly dropping dramatically.

My hope here is that by removing the foreign crawler that we'll be able to sustain more real activity on the site to make up for that.

For those of you who are curious, this means that we're going to stop showing up in searches from China, specifically on Baidu. Since we mostly gain new users by word of mouth, not showing up on one search engine (as long as that one search engine isn't Google) isn't going to hurt us too much.

Edit: If we have any users from mainland China who have been unintentionally caught by this firewall rule, please let me know; I'll narrow the block if it turns out this affects legitimate users.