Cloudhiker

Dear fellow hikers,

it's been a couple of years since Cloudhiker was launched, and the exploring experience was rarely touched in it's essence. There are no issues with it as it runs very stable. It also uses very few resources, which allows me to keep the server costs for Cloduhiker small. Everything works fine.

In the past years, however, the internet changed a bit. A large bit, to be honest, and it can mostly attributed to the raise of cheap AI. Everyone can set up a blog and fill it with literally hundreds of articles in a couple of hours. A whole ecosystem evolved, and more and more people started to ask if AI could be banned or restricted on our beloved platform. While I'm strictly against banning AI in general (as there are many cool projects), i totally understand that many of you simply don't want to see that stuff.
A few months ago, I added the AI flag for websites. In the meantime, over 200 websites were marked as AI-related. The only culprit: that flag did not change anything about your exploring experience. This changes now.

A large internal overhaul

The AI flag wasn't the first time I looked into expanding the user settings for customizing their exploring experience. Since the start, only categories could be selected and if you want to skip websites that can't be displayed directly inside Cloudhiker. And one big improvement could be a filter for the website type (blog article, game, web tool,..). I pushed that into the future, because there was simply no easy way to actually implement that in the current logic.

So, long story short: with the raising interest in the AI flag and the potential for adding website types, I decided to rewrite the internal exploring logic. It took a long time. But I'm quite happy with the result. The new code is flexible enough to add any new filters coming in the future.
I hope you'll enjoy the new ability to block AI sites. If you still see one without a flag, please report it. You can change your exploring options in your account settings.

There's an unfortunate side-effect: right after the new exploring goes live, your exploring progress will be reset.
If you encounter any issues or weird, unexpected behaviour in the next time, please let me know immediately. I tried to test all possible cases, but of course nothing is perfect.

Happy exploring y'all,

Kevin