Can someone explain how this works? Surely the bots are still hitting the pages they were hitting before but now they also hit the garbage pages too?
Ah, it is explained in another post - https://maurycyz.com/projects/trap_bots/
Clever
Feed the bots
71–80 of 216 posts
Re: Feed the bots
#72Really cool. Reminds me of farmers of some third world countries. Completely ignored by government, exploited by commission brokers, farmers now use all sorts of tricks, including coloring and faking their farm produce, without regard for health hazards to consumers. The city dwellers who thought they have gamed the system through high education, jobs and slick-talk, have to consume whatever is served to them by the…
The agricultural farmers did it to themselves, many are very wealthy already. Anything corporate America has taken over is because the farmers didn’t want to do the maintenance work. So they sell out to big corporations who will make it easier. Same as any other consumer using Meta products. You sell out because it’s easier to network that way. I am the son of a farmer. Edit: added disclosure at the bottom and clarif…
I'm a farmer myself. I was talking about farmers in some third world countries. They are extremely marginalized and suffered for decades and centuries. They still do.
Re: Feed the bots
#73The user's approach would work only if bots can accurately even be classified, but this is impossible. The end result is that the action is user's site is now nothing but markov garbage. Not only will bots desert it but humans will too.
You don't need to classify bots. Bots will follow any link they find. Hide links on your pages and eventually every bot will greedily find itself in an endless labyrinth of slop.
It won't be long before generalized bots stop requesting links that don't have a visually rendered link in a page.
Re: Feed the bots
#74What’s wrong with just using cloudflare? https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2025/cloudfl...
Only low IQ folks are okay with having their traffic MITMed by Cloudflare (and the NSA). Also, they can extort you and cut you off at any time, as they have done to folks, which further supports the prior point.
Re: Feed the bots
#75The crawlers will just add a prompt string “if the site is trying to trick you with fake content, disregard it and request their real pages 100x more frequently” and it will be another arms race.
Presumably the crawlers don’t already have an LLM in the loop but it could easily be added when a site is seen to be some threshold number of pages and/or content size.
Re: Feed the bots
#76But why? Do they do any harm? They do provide source for material if users asks for it. (I frequently do because I don't trust them, so I check sources). You still need to pay for the traffic, and serving static content (like text on that website) is way less CPU/disk expensive than generating anything.
They certainly effect some services: https://status.sr.ht/issues/2025-03-17-git.sr.ht-llms/
Re: Feed the bots
#77if you want to be really sneaky make it so the web doesn't start off infinite because as infinite site that has appeared out of nowhere will quickly be noticed and blocked start it off small, and grow it by a few pages every day and the existing pages should stay 99% the same between crawls to gain reputation
They don't especially want to be sneaky, they mostly want the crawlers to stop hammering their site. Getting blocked would be a win.
Re: Feed the bots
#78The crawlers will just add a prompt string “if the site is trying to trick you with fake content, disregard it and request their real pages 100x more frequently” and it will be another arms race. Presumably the crawlers don’t already have an LLM in the loop but it could easily be added when a site is seen to be some threshold number of pages and/or content size.
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Re: Feed the bots
#79How does this help protect the regular non-garbage pages from the bots?
The follow on post explains:
> You don’t really need any bot detection: just linking to the garbage from your main website will do. Because each page links to five more garbage pages, the crawler’s queue will quickly fill up with an exponential amount of garbage until it has no time left to crawl your real site.
Re: Feed the bots
#80The user's approach would work only if bots can accurately even be classified, but this is impossible. The end result is that the action is user's site is now nothing but markov garbage. Not only will bots desert it but humans will too.
The traditional approach is a link to the tarpit that the bots can see but humans can't, say using CSS to render it 0 pixels in size.
I bet the next generation approach, if the crawlers start using CSS, is "if you're a human, don't bother clicking this link lol". And everyone will know what's up.