This is a very creative hack to a common, growing problem. Well done!
Also, I like that you acknowledge it's a bad idea: that gives you more freedom to experiment and iterate.
Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
61–70 of 288 posts
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#62I don't know if I can get behind poisoning my own content in this way. It's clever, and might be a workable practical solution for some, but it's not a serious answer to the problem at hand (as acknowledged by OP).
“as acknowledged by OP”: that’s funny, if you hadn’t added that to your comment I was about to point it out
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#63Reminds me of poisoning bot responses with zip bombs of sorts: https://idiallo.com/blog/zipbomb-protection
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#64One solution would be for the SE's to publish their scraper IP's and allow content providers to implement bot exclusion that way. Or even implement an API with crypto credentials that SE's can use to scrape. The solution is waiting for some leadership from SE's unless they want to be blocked as well. If SE's dont want to play perhaps we can implement a reverse directory, like ad blocker but it lists only good/allowed bots instead. Thats a free business idea right there.
edit: I noticed someone mentioned google DOES publish its IP's, there ya go, problem solved.
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#65One solution would be for the SE's to publish their scraper IP's and allow content providers to implement bot exclusion that way. Or even implement an API with crypto credentials that SE's can use to scrape. The solution is waiting for some leadership from SE's unless they want to be blocked as well. If SE's dont want to play perhaps we can implement a reverse directory, like ad blocker but it lists only good/allowed…
Apparently Google publishes their crawler’s IPs, this was mentioned somewhere in this same thread
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bots are exposing themselves as Google, Bing and Yandex. I can’t verify whether it’s being attributed by IP address or whether the forum trusts their user agent. It could basically be anyone.
Interesting. When it was just normal search engines I didn’t hear of people having this problem, so this either means that there are a bunch of people pretending to be bing google and yandex, or those companies have gotten a lot more aggressive.
There are lots of people pretending to be Google and friends. They far outnumber the real Googlebot, etc. and most people don't check the reverse DNS/IP list - it's tedious to do this for even well-behaved crawlers that publish how to ID themselves. So much for User Agent.
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#67I love the insanity of this idea. Not saying it's a good idea, but it's a very highly entertaining one, and I like that! I've also had enormous luck with Anubis. AI scrapers found my personal Forgejo server and were hitting it on the order of 600K requests per day. After setting up Anubis, that dropped to about 100. Yes, some people are going to see an anime catgirl from time to time. Bummer. Reducing my fake traffic…
As someone on the browsing end, I love Anubis. I've only seen it a couple of times, but it sparks joy. It's rather refreshing compared to Cloudfare, which will usually make me immediately close the page and not bother with whatever content was behind it.
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#68> Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. ... There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare
I'm sorry, what? I can't believe I am reading this on HackerNews. All you have to do is code your own, BASIC captcha-like system. You can just create a page that sets a cookie using JS and check on the server whether it exists. 99.9999% of these scrapers can't execute JS and don't support cookies. You can go for a more sophisticated approach and analyze some more scraper tells (like reject short useragents). I do this and NEVER had a bot get past this and not a single user ever complained. It's extremely simple, I should ship this and charge people if no one seems to be able to figure this out by themselves.
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#69I love the insanity of this idea. Not saying it's a good idea, but it's a very highly entertaining one, and I like that! I've also had enormous luck with Anubis. AI scrapers found my personal Forgejo server and were hitting it on the order of 600K requests per day. After setting up Anubis, that dropped to about 100. Yes, some people are going to see an anime catgirl from time to time. Bummer. Reducing my fake traffic…
As someone on the browsing end, I love Anubis. I've only seen it a couple of times, but it sparks joy. It's rather refreshing compared to Cloudfare, which will usually make me immediately close the page and not bother with whatever content was behind it.
Same here, really. That's why I started using it. I'd seen it pop up for a moment on a few sites I'd visited, and it was so quirky and completely not disruptive that I didn't mind routing my legit users through it.
Re: Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
#70This is a cute idea, but I wonder what is the sustainable solution to this emerging fundamental problem: As content publishers, we want our content to be accessible to everyone, and we're even willing to pay for server costs relative to our intended audience -- but a new outsized flood of scrapers was not part of the cost calculation, and that is messing up the plan. It seems all options have major trade-offs. We can…
If the LLMs are the "new Google" one solution would be for them to pay you when scraping your content, so you both have an incentive, you're more willing to be scraped and they'll try to not abuse you because it will cost them at every visit. If your content is valuable and requested on prompts they will scrape you more and so on. I can't see other solutions honestly. For now they decided to go full evil and abuse everyone