Comment by adamtaylor_13
1 hour ago
So if you need to prevent bot abuse, but also don't want an ugly captcha every time someone goes to sign up, is there a better option?
1 hour ago
So if you need to prevent bot abuse, but also don't want an ugly captcha every time someone goes to sign up, is there a better option?
Use proof-of-work captchas, many are private by default. Look into Private Captcha or Cap captcha.
How does proof of work stop bots?
Because it destroys the economics of scraping. It’s too expensive with proof of work, or at least not as economically viable
2 replies →
If it gets too expensive/time-consuming to scrape then it won't happen at scale (as much)?
The tool "Anubis" uses proof of work instead
With a tuned cool down period this isn't a problem, especially if you frequent the sites. OpenWRT uses Anubis and usually when I need to peruse their site I'm on a very low-end device. I prefer waiting much more over finding Waldos
But in principle I agree that there's no good answer to this, scraping _is_ useful and I bet most of us here had scraped something, it is AI company and their use of human's material for training without consent and return that led us to this (I know botting exists in forum since forum is a thing but it is easily solved by human moderators and keyword filter)
Anubis often takes more than 60 seconds to complete on low-end devices (especially old smartphones). It seems like there's no good solution.
That must be really low end then. I’ve never seen it complete in a timeframe that was slower than “I can’t even read the page before it redirects”
There's not an easy, perfect solution, for sure. Newer phones get faster, but spammer compute gets cheaper.
Some sort of decentralized trust web seems like another option, though less viable.
1 reply →
How does Anubis stop bots?
Bots don't execute JavaScript or follow complicated redirects.