Comment by Bender
1 day ago
For me it's just a fun exercise to see what generalizations I can make about bots that botters can not really avoid or code around such as javascript. Yeah this blog is all precompressed static content in a ram disk. I'm sure it could handle a few hundred thousand requests per second. This is to show methods people could use on their forums, chan sites, chat servers, etc... Every option is optional and tunable. Any option people consider should be tested on a test server. People could just point and laugh if they so desired and that works for me too.
As of now roughly 4661 real humans can reach it. 9 people can not reach it. A few of those 9 I expect to be blocked being on VPN's that egress data-centers.
I could improve this by moving most of the blocking to a demo site so the article is easier to access. I will do that. I will also update some of the nginx ACL's to what I am currently using that explain to the botters what is out of place.
As of now 6622 real humans made it through and a small number of what look to be bots. Curious if any of these people will try their own experiments on this topic.
Bender, even got yourself a great username. One of the most responsive authors in memory.
Thankyou. It's a fun topic for me. Hopefully others will find it interesting to tinker and experiment with as well.
Not pointing and laughing, just wondering why (since I see so many posts about this). Sounds like it's just for the thrill of the game, which is completely valid.
Thrill of the game is a great way to put it.
I wish it was framed as "silly ways to block bots" then so that people wouldn't take it as a recommendation
i guess the thing i'm most confused about is what is the higher level goal here. 1 in 8 humans on the planet are experiencing the "web" through chatgpt alone. many have migrated to purely agentic workflows.
is the goal for your content to just be invisible to this growing population? is the expectation that all of this is just a fad, which will fade away? what is the end game to the tactics you have outlined? what is the strategy?
I like those ideas. If people are truly operating purely through LLM's then I am fine with being partitioned from them. The LLM operators will provide their reality and their truth. This is all for low trust internet-wide access.
For smaller higher trust communities I don't do any of this. Rather we use basic authentication to keep bots and strangers off the services all together and then regular user accounts on forums and such. That is where strategy comes into play and has been working well for some time.
i guess what i'm curious about is where you would draw the line, and why.
how do you define a user agent? is it desirable or not for users to be able to discover and access resources and communities on the internet using the tools, formats, and workflows that they prefer?
are search bots desirable?
the internet wayback machine?
how do you feel about browser extensions and greasemonkey scripts?
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Do you have a source for those numbers?
ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users.
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I wonder what the click through rate is for the source links. Based on what I've been hearing, it's very low. And that's if the particular LLM/interface/answer even bothers to add them.
If the bots are eating your site traffic and users, what's the point of allowing them in?