Our Website Source Is Now Private, A Cautionary Tale

QuestDB, an open-source time-series database known for its high performance, encountered a significant issue when its website traffic surged unexpectedly due to a clone of its site being hosted elsewhere, resulting in over 150,000 new visitors mistakenly attributed to their analytics. This incident highlighted the risks of having their Google Analytics tag hard-coded directly in their open-source repository, leading to unauthorized copying of their website's content and branding. Despite no significant punitive impact on their search rankings, QuestDB decided to make their website repository private to protect against similar incidents in the future while exploring ways to keep parts of their documentation open for community contributions. This situation underscores the importance of using environment variables for sensitive data to prevent unauthorized access and potential misuse.