Message-ID: <CABdHhvFQJ9SBcONBpdyHzza1d9ZTMcNBoO_QyDvjz9xT0c4ZzQ@mail.gmail.com>
Date: 2026-01-13T13:32:27Z
From: Hadley Wickham
Subject: [R-pkg-devel] CRAN submissions down?
In-Reply-To: <17A93EE5-DD01-4946-9791-8FD45BDFCBAD@R-project.org>
>
>
>
> > On 12 Jan 2026, at 14:37, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal via
> R-package-devel <r-package-devel at r-project.org> wrote:
> >
> > For what it is worth in my case as far as I can tell the behaviors of
> both devtools::submit_cran and the cran machine were quote reasonable,
> even if it caused me a little pain. The block Uwe describes sounds like
> fail2ban or the like, and given the junk we see hitting our services it
> is a reasonable thing to run. I had the day wrong when I thought cran was
> back up. devtools on submission said ti couldn?t connect, It is not
> unreasonable as a submitter, thinking the machine was back up, to wait a
> bit, and try again, and maybe do so a few times throughout the day.
> That is indeed what I did. Then to be sure it wasn?t a devtools problem I
> went to the web page and that is when it seemed to block me.
> >
> > So my point is everything to my mind behaved reasonably. The only thing
> I could suggest, and I have no idea of how much work this would entail,
> and I am not looking to make work for people, is perhaps a banner on the
> webpage when the service is down,
>
>
> That?s the thing - there *was* a red banner that said no submissions are
> accepted so everyone using the official CRAN way was fine, it?s the
> back-door access by devtools that caused the problems. The issue is that
> once devtools got you blocked, it was too late so you couldn?t go back and
> see that you were not supposed to use it since your IP was already on the
> blacklist even for the official front-end. Clearly, devtools needs to be
> fixed to make sure it?s not submitting things blindly when it?s not
> supposed - probably with some help from the CRAN admin team to make sure
> there is a well-defiled path for this.
Would it be possible for the form to be blocked as well as the submission
page? Typically web servers return a 404 or a 403 when a page isn't
available.
I can of course scrape the submission page, but now that the message is
gone, I don't know what to look for.
Hadley
--
http://hadley.nz
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