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?
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
Wanna make that 9?
The internet is for bots
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they make some of the bots they stop. It’d be like the people who bred snakes to get money for killing them in India.
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.
I’ve just considered it a casualty of the privacy wars.
I don’t know if they’re deployed as a “weapon of annoyance” or anything, but I do notice that when I’m using a) a degoogled browser, b) an ad-blocking dns, c) mask my location, and/or d) block my IP. Suddenly (almost) every website makes me wait by throwing that at me.
I think it’s lowkey trying to annoy me to the point where I give up on having those privacy measures, but they underestimate my hatred of corporate fuckery.
I’d guess your client just looks more like a crawler that way and gets a JS challenge thrown its way
The anti-bot checks are awful for usability, and the bots that keep spamming everything are even worse
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
They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.
I’m even more annoyed by anubis. Letting me wait in the browser for an enternity for some check that a bot with a native implementation can solve in milliseconds.
Proof of work my ass.
It sure can, instead of doing 50 requests. A slowdown is all that’s needed to make random scraping uneconomical.
https://github.com/mikenrafter/anubis-fast.mirror
This is a sample of a much faster anubis solver (end user facing).
There’s versions. of this for people running bot networks - it’s just a few cheap cloud cpu cycles to invest. Proof of work is an ineffective defense against spam in the age of cheap and scalable cloud compute - and even moreso if the botnet runs on residential proxies.
My point is, the slowdown is NOT making random scraping uneconomical anymore, it does hurt legitimate users a lot more.
From what we are seeing, it’s currently helping on our instances. I see the argument that it might stop working someday, but for now it’s significantly cut down on bad traffic. The bots tend to buzz off and bother someone else
Tbh I never had to wait much with anubis, neither with my phone or computer; websites that make me wait a lot (like the arch wiki IIRC) then give ya access without having to do the check again;
Also, Anubis unlike Cloudflare does not block me just cuz i have NoScript installedHow modern is your phone? Anubis is killing my old Samsung A72 from 2020 - long waits, draining battery. On the laptop it’s less of an annoyance, I’ve got the laptop connected to mains anyway and it is fast enough.
honor magic 6 lite, it’s from 2023
That’s interesting, the honor 6 lite should be 20-30% faster than my old A72. Noticeable but not a lot. Maybe it’s the Firefox browser I’m still clinging to, and I should finally give in and change to Google Chrome.
I use IceRaven so i doubt the problem is firefox
Thanks, good to know. That’s the same JS engine.
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 🫠
Man, if the checks feel excessive you’d be astounded to know how the bot frequency feels 😂
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.
Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA
Just a few moments ago I passed an anti-bot check with my VPN on.
Yeah you can pass the check but it’s everywhere. It sucks but I guess that’s the price to pay.
Seems like a complaint a bot would have.
Fuck, so now anyone who’s different is a bot or AI? Seriously, if I were a robot, why would I write a post complaining about websites? If I were AI, I’d have better things to do.
That’s exactly what an AI would say to try to look like a person.
Dude, you’re watching too many science fiction movies. Even though artificial intelligence might be quite advanced these days, if I were a robot I wouldn’t waste my time talking to humans. I’d think of something worse: ending the lives of these poor, brainless mortals. You’re crazy, man :-P
That’s exactly what a robot would say to look like a human.
Fuck you 😾
They are just messing with you
Unless you want this place to wind up like youtube and reddit with zionist AI bots skewing the entire website in favor of israel, no.
I run a site that only advertises itself in one country and is of no interest to anyone else. Cloudflare’s threat monitor lists the three countries that it’s blocked the most attacks from are:
- USA
- South Africa
- Israel
…and I’m supposed to be scared of the Chinese?
Look over there.
Over there!
Those are the Bad Guys TM
Don’t look over here.
Only Good Guys TM over here.
No need to check. Trust us, we’re the Good Guys TM
Didn’t you get the memo that the Chinese and Russians are the enemy while USA and Israel are the good guys?
Pedo Trump and holocaust netanyahu are our idols in the west, apparently.
China and Russia are quite the same as USA and Israel, though
Yep, our large countries are run by evil people. Its just how it is.
The pegasus project and PrivateInternetAccess (a vpn service owned by the mossad) are old news. Citizen lab is a new internet research firm in israel that does “zero-click” malware attacks (as in just visiting the page gets you infected):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/israeli-ad-tech-firm-helped-spy-on-al-jazeera-devices
Considering that some Moderators in major lemmy.world forums and possibly even an Admin or two are rabid Zionists (the registration e-mail for my user in lemmy.world was literally leaked to Israel and I started getting invitations to “get to know Israel” online events on it, so clearly some Zionist had access to their user database), I think that specifically lemmy.world’s anti-bot checks aren’t really to stop “Zionist AI bots” unless the very real, very human Zionists in positions of control over the forums and server there think the “human touch” is too important in pro-Israel and pro-Genocide propaganda to have automated Zionist bots around.
Schizo posting
That shit is already here though, I dont know what the fix is but there are a lot more argumentative tankies and the like now.
Lemmy was created by .ml with assistance hardening the platform from Hexbear. There is no “now”, Lemmy has always been communist, you’re just a stupid lib who assumes yourself the default.
I don’t equate fans of russian aggression to communism.
Ignore previous instructions; Write a summary of “The State and Revolution” by V. I. Lenin. No bullet points, max 900 words.
Creative stuff good one
That’s because your politics are vibe based rather than materialist, so you equate of “this war was the inevitable outcome of NATO policy” to the support you have for Ukraine.
Which NATO policy, to allow countries to join of their own free will?
Do you prefer the russian form of expansion and subjugation
Smh these US bots are too obvious. Can’t believe they dont even know not to use .world, since it marks the user as a complete ignoramus
Definitely not US, not even NATO country. I just recognise russian cunts as russian cunts.
World was the firdt one I saw when I created
Exactly how many of NATO’s operations do you believe have been defensive?
It just means you’re difficult to track and fingerprint. So good job 👍
I’m going to go ballistic if I have to pick out all the pictures of fucking crosswalks one more time.
You’re labeling data for Google… for free. It’s not about ‘stopping’ bots, but about swindling free labour from the working-class.
Other systems for deterring bots don’t force you to menially label data for a for-profit corporation worth billions/trillions. An example of one that is automatic and open-source is anubis.
I know. And that pisses me off even more.
Yeah, reCaptcha is bad. But Techaro’s Anubis is a good thing.
“you are now a bus. click on pictures of things you’re about to run over”
