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Comment by ribtoks

35 minutes ago

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

    • Depends on what type of scraping you're trying to stop. For the dumb scrapers that would try to scrape every page on a git forge (for which there are a bazillion pages for a modest project, because of how the site works), yeah it might deter them enough to stop. For anything high value (eg. reddit comments or retail prices), 10s of cpu time isn't going to stop them.

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  • If it gets too expensive/time-consuming to scrape then it won't happen at scale (as much)?