I’m getting really tired of “verify you’re not a bot” checks everywhere.
I understand these checks help prevent bots, but they seem to appear on so many websites now. Does anyone else find them frustrating?
The anti-bot checks are awful for usability, and the bots that keep spamming everything are even worse
Cloudflare can fuck right off!
Use anubis
I dunno, Anubis never gave me too much trouble, meanwhile that fucking “Gandalf” thing they have on some Nitter/Redlib instances keeps getting stuck on my device, and if you reload the page you get insta blocked 🫠
Not as excessive as all the crap that can happen after a data breach.
or a car crash…
They’ve made a large chunk of the internet inaccesible to me.
Are you a bot ?
Beep Bop Boop.
That depends. How well do they work?
These days? Fuck no. I think it’s like 57% of all web traffic these days is just bots. This is absolutely needed.
Cloudflare is getting rich from all of these bots. We had turn to Cloudflare at work because bots were scraping our website and essentially DDoSing. Cloudflare worked perfectly and rate limiting bot scraping.
You can add “Strengthened Cloudflare as the Internet’s single point of failure” to the long, growing list of awful things which have happened due to this AI boom.
I run a reticulum NomadNet site. I setup logging, since there are no ‘sessions’ and I don’t want to force everyone to identify, I just calcuate bot traffic based on time, order and frequency of loads, bots’s scraping are likely 80% of my traffic. And this is for a service that’s designed to support 200bps radio links.
It’s proportional to the amount of rude AI crawling, from what I’ve heard.
The industry has put every reasonably accessible piece of human writing in their datasets, by now, and are scrounging for the remaining little bits. Old, obscure, obsolete paper books nobody ever reads are apparently a hot item. So, yeah, your latest blog post is probably worth some fraction of a penny, and that’s all it takes.
In the last 24 hours my small personal website got 8 legitimate visitors and 74,000 requests from bots, most of which were either malicious or aggressive ai crawlers
The internet is for bots
I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.
This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.
CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.
It is what it is I suppose.
Im ok with them as long as theyre not demanding input by clicking everything that is a fire post so they can train their ai for free
I wish they could do it transparently but no, they’re not excessive. There’s too many bots on the Internet and it’s fucking things up.
I can’t think of a site that doesn’t use these anymore.
It is that or shutting down your site.
Those fucking bots just keep coming, causing traffic no small or medium site can cope with. So yeah, deal with it.
Captchas suck. Don’t trust reCaptcha, and avoid Cloudflare captchas.
That said, Techaro’s Anubis is a good thing.
why is it a good thing ?
Techaro’s Anubis is software that challenges bots without prompting the user directly. Unlike reCaptcha, it’s not a tracking utility that collects data or trains LLMs. It’s just a computational burden to make bot scraping less economical, according to the burden on the website. This protects the website from excessive traffic while still serving users without pestering or tracking them.