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A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

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Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#131
post #9

Is there any cheap way to run personal websites without getting cooked by bots these days, degrading the performance? A $5/month VPS won't cut it anymore.

My site's built in Go on a reasonably priced VPS and holds up well. I do geoblock traffic from China and a few other countries as well as IP ranges maintained by Spamhaus.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#132
post #9

Is there any cheap way to run personal websites without getting cooked by bots these days, degrading the performance? A $5/month VPS won't cut it anymore.

Sef-host with tailscale or something similar

Exactly. I've been hosting a site from a spare M1 Macbook Pro with Ngrok. An equivalent bare metal server would be much more expensive.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#133
post #10

I'm in a similar boat. Probably 99.999% is bots. I have nearly 1m unique "visitors" according to cloudflare and my real users are in the dozens a day. That being said, I love the open internet and am holding on to keeping as much open as I can.

But what do these bots gain from this?

The most recent info of every single fucking thing on the web. Everything. Data locusts.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#134
post #92

Anubis[1] is a superb fix for sites not behind Cloudflare/Fastly/Bunny etc. We had millions of bot requests, on a site serving all countries so we couldn't block by country, with fake user-agents so we couldn't block using that. It uses 'proof of work' to detect real browser software. [1] https://anubis.techaro.lol/

make your only legit users mine fake crypto to access your site, only costs them 5% battery on an android device

They think scraping = money so you can just ask them to scrape (copy paste websites into a text area) and it will feel like payment.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#135
post #118

Can someone help me understand the underlying motivation behind this? It makes sense that some crawlers, in the style of Google, would want to index the entire internet. But what is the point of the same crawler re-fetching a page they already fetched an hour ago? Or possibly all this traffic is just independent entities, each trying to cache the internet? The scale of bot traffic makes this seem unlikely. What's the…

The most recent data on the internet for advertising, intelligence, etc.

And a lot of bad scrapers.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#137

Anubis[1] is a superb fix for sites not behind Cloudflare/Fastly/Bunny etc. We had millions of bot requests, on a site serving all countries so we couldn't block by country, with fake user-agents so we couldn't block using that. It uses 'proof of work' to detect real browser software. [1] https://anubis.techaro.lol/

I wish they'd ease up on the whole "don't change the logo without paying us" thing. The furry anime character is a turnoff for anyone with a brand or personal image that doesn't mesh with those subcultures.

haproxy-protection is an alternative.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#138
post #117
post #101

The worrying thing here is that so many people accepted outsourcing the decision on who can see their website to a large company (Cloudflare). If the company decides that a certain user should not see the website, the user will not see the website, and no one will know about it, and the user will have no recourse. That is not the open web that I would like to see. A second side effect of a knee-jerk reaction to bots…

> If I run a local script or an LLM that needs to fetch a web page from your site and you block that script or LLM as being a bot, you hurt me, the user. No; in this case you are not a user, you are a bot user.

The best way to read the information on the internet today is via a LLM.

Just like you don't process raw data in a data warehouse or datalake by looking at tables, you use a SQL or BI tool, to process all the information on the internet you need to tool to digest it for you. For many, today that tool is a LLM chat interface or agent.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#139
post #10

I'm in a similar boat. Probably 99.999% is bots. I have nearly 1m unique "visitors" according to cloudflare and my real users are in the dozens a day. That being said, I love the open internet and am holding on to keeping as much open as I can.

But what do these bots gain from this?

Possibly content that appears only briefly? I'm not sure otherwise. It seems wasteful.
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