Game UI Database considers login wall as AI scraping evades detection

Game UI Database holds 78,563 screenshots and 2,554 videos from nearly 2,000 games. Creator Edd Coates says AI bots now spread traffic to evade detection. Logs show millions of fake daily visitors split into chunks like 600,000 and 500,000 hits. Coates is weighing a login system, calling it at odds with the database's open mission.

Two years ago, single-source traffic spikes were enough to flag an attack.
Scrapers now split millions of daily visits across many sources at once.
Individual sources post 600,000 and 500,000 hits apiece, masking the attack as popularity.
Database searches fire hundreds of times per second, a clearly non-human pattern.
"So the biggest change I've noticed in the last two years is that, despite the obvious pushback, they've gotten really good at hiding from us." - Edd Coates, Creator, Game UI Database

Coates has maxed out Cloudflare's captcha settings, the platform's toughest challenge tier.
He has blocked entire countries from the site out of desperation.
Filters available to real users have been limited to reduce bot abuse.
Cloudflare's "under attack" mode, built to stop DDOS attacks, failed outright last weekend.
"There will definitely have to be some sort of restriction coming at some point, because the situation is getting ridiculous, and it's only going to get worse." - Edd Coates, Creator, Game UI Database

Coates calls a login system a 'pain in the ass,' at odds with the project's spirit.
He is already building an account system for the platform's moodboard tools.
Coates hopes that feature will make a wider login requirement an 'easier sell.'
The database is currently open to anyone with internet access, with no sign-in required.

Coates says paid mentorship schemes now promote AI in design workflows.
Design tool Rive has added agent support that can generate UI.
Coates says his labelled dataset lets companies train AI without his permission.
"This resource that I built to help people in my community is now being used to train the tools to replace them." - Edd Coates, Creator, Game UI Database

Coates says the UI/UX community has stayed supportive throughout the ongoing attacks.
Developers continue contributing content despite the scraping and training controversy.
The backing has not stopped Coates from weighing stricter access controls regardless.

For Publishers & Developers: Require training-data provenance warranties from AI UI-generation tool vendors before studio adoption.
For Investors & VC: Add consent-based training-data sourcing to diligence on AI game-UI tool startups.