Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

obscrd.dev

1–10 of 46 posts

Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#1
Hey HN -- I'm a solo dev. Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing.

The core trick: shuffle characters and words in your HTML using a seed, then use CSS (flexbox order, direction: rtl, unicode-bidi) to put them back visually. Browser renders perfectly. textContent returns garbage.

On top of that: email/phone RTL obfuscation with decoy characters, AI honeypots that inject prompt instructions into LLM scrapers, clipboard interception, canvas-based image rendering (no img src in DOM), robots.txt blocking 30+ AI crawlers, and forensic breadcrumbs to prove content theft.

What it doesn't stop: headless browsers that execute CSS, screenshot+OCR, or anyone determined enough to reverse-engineer the ordering. I put this in the README's threat model because I'd rather say it myself than have someone else say it for me. The realistic goal is raising the cost of scraping -- most bots use simple HTTP requests, and we make that useless.

TypeScript, Bun, tsup, React 18+. 162 tests. MIT licensed. Nothing to sell -- the SDK is free and complete.

Best way to understand it: open DevTools on the site and inspect the text.

GitHub: https://github.com/obscrd/obscrd

Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage
obscrd.dev

Re: Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#4

This is also what Facebook does. Same result: screen readers and assistive software is rendered useless. Basically is a sign of "I hate disabled people, and AI too"

Fair concern. obscrd actually preserves screen reader access. CSS flexbox order is a visual reordering property, so assistive tech follows the visual order and reads the text correctly. Contact components use sr-only spans with clean text and aria-hidden on the obfuscated layer. We target WCAG 2.2 AA compliance.

Happy to have a11y experts poke at it and point out gaps.

Re: Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#5
You break highlighting and copy-and-paste. If I want to share or comment on a piece of your website... I can't. I guess this can be a "feature" in some rare cases, but a major usability pain otherwise.

I'm not a fan of all the documentation and marketing content for this project evidently being AI-generated because I don't know which parts of it are the things you believe and designed for, and which are just LLM verbal diarrhea. For example, your GitHub threat model says this stops "AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, etc.)" - is this something you've actually confirmed, or just something that AI thinks is true? I don't know how their scrapers work; I'd assume they use headless browsers.

Re: Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#6
Nice. I have been working on something which utilizes obfuscation, honeypots etc and I have come to a few realizations-

- today you don't have to be a dedicated/motivated reverse engineer- you just need Sonnet 4.6 and let it do the work.

- you need to throw constant/new gotchas to LLMs to keep them on their tows while they try to reverse engineer your website.

Re: Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#8
All I want is an API for my AI, you can ask me for my public key, if you want my human identity verified. The collateral damage of this bot hunting is the emergence of personal AIs. Do we really want that? It feels regressive. (I see the hypocrisy here, we are fighting the scrapers that feed the LLMs that runs our personal agents)

Re: Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

#9
Another thing you can do is to install a font with jumbled characters: "a" looks like "x", "b" looks like "n", and so on. Then instead of writing "abc" you write "jmw" and it looks like "abc" on the screen. This has been used as a form of DRM for eBooks.

It breaks copy/paste and screen readers, but so does your idea.

Post reply on HN