CSUMB Data Glossary Site Down

Update 4/3/2026: The CSUMB Data Glossary site is back up but may experience additional downtime due to ongoing known issues.

Original post: 

The CSUMB Data Glossary site is down and displaying the following error message:

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties. 

Try waiting a few minutes and reloading. 

(Cannot access the database). 

MyWikis, our hosting service, has been experiencing increased traffic from AI crawler bots that are affecting all MediaWiki sites, including Wikipedia. MyWikis is working on additional layers of protection against the AI crawler bots and rolling these out across their hosted sites.

We're opening a support request with MyWikis, and we will update as progress is made.

Read additional context from MyWikis on this issue below: 

AI crawler bots aren't just affecting wikis on MyWikis; they are affecting everyone, even Wikipedia. Because of how pervasive the issue has become, we wanted to provide transparency about what efforts we are making to combat against AI crawler bots, along with what we're doing with our community partners. We'd like to share some of the updates about changes we've made to fight against AI crawler bots.

First, we've introduced an additional layer of protection to each wiki on MyWikis Cloud, capable of fighting against many types of bot attacks. This will be introduced to wikis on MyWikis Dedicated in the coming days/weeks, depending on how well it works on MyWikis Cloud. This new layer of protection, installed a few days ago, should prevent the downtime which you may have experienced in recent weeks. We are still refining the rules deployed, so if you encounter issues with using your wiki, please don't hesitate to let us know ASAP so we can address it.

Additionally, CrawlerProtection was installed on all MyWikis Cloud wikis in the middle of last year and has been added to many MyWikis Dedicated wikis over recent months as well. This is an anti-AI crawler extension written by MyWikis, originally for our own use, but now used by our peers and competitors in the community too. We're going to work on adding additional features, such as fine-tuning which pages can and shouldn't be blocked.

Wikis with high volumes of traffic may have noticed interstititals added, which does a quick anti-bot security check before granting authorization for 24 hours and redirecting back to the wiki. We have found this to be very effective in stopping bot traffic. We know that these aren't ideal, though. It would be much better to get to your wiki content immediately. Our goal is to eventually remove these once bot traffic dies down and is feasible to manage/block in other ways.

AI crawler bots have been affecting Wikipedia (and its parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation) worse than they have been affecting MyWikis. The WMF has done great work in fighting back against the AI crawler bots. Pending approval from WMF Legal, we will be participating in a community collaboration with the WMF's security team to collectively fight back against spam bots, sharing what has and what hasn't worked for us.

For now, it looks like we have been able to suppress most of the AI crawler bot traffic. We're also careful to never prevent Google from being able to safely crawl wikis' traffic. Don't worry—your wiki's SEO will not be negatively impacted by these efforts.

However, the fight against malicious AI crawler bots unfortunately never ends. That's why we deeply appreciate your continued support and patronage during these times of change in the technology space and beyond. By sticking with MyWikis, you'll give your wiki the best chance of keeping itself up and running during this difficult time. Your patience is very much appreciated as well.

We welcome feedback and suggestions about how your experience has been with using your wiki, and let us know immediately if you are being blocked from accessing your own wiki. We certainly don't want legitimate users to be blocked. You're welcome to open a ticket with our support team, who will address these issues right away.

Thank you,
The MyWikis Team