A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website. What I tried, how I failed, and what's working now.

A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website. What I tried, how I failed, and what’s working now.

  • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    I work on an ecomm site and it’s nightmarish. We have all the cloudflare protections turned on but do try to tune out system so american AI companies will scrape us (we want chatgpt to send us customers and use our data).

    Still, we have a country allow list because it’s easier to admit North American traffic and the specific IPs our contractors use, then block everyone else. The amount of bot traffic flooding in globally is insane. I don’t think the current day internet infrastructure is going to be able to absorb the abuse much longer.

  • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I thought Cloudflare’s anti-AI defenses were meant to dynamically catch all of this. That’s a lot of work to do to keep bot traffic away.

    FWIW, I tried loading it with a VPN, it showed the content, but not all the images. Turned off VPN, it fully loaded. Maybe the blog has different rules.

    • undefinedTruth@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Why would a website owner use this over Anubis. Not bashing it or anything, just curious how it differentiates?

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
        2·
        2 days ago

        I wanted to have high performance. See my benchmarks. I’m able to reach 150k-180k reqs/sec allowing me to handle ddos attacks as well. Even under very heavy load. Anubis will fall apart.

        Great question BTW!

    • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPMEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      I don’t run PatronView, just sharing the blog post from them.

      I tried to access angieguardian.org, but was met with “JavaScript is required to access this site” which basically guaranteed I will never visit it again.

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
        2·
        3 days ago

        OK fine. That is due to the pow. The whole point of Angie Guardian. I also don’t like it. But the internet is fked up!

  • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Wait… AJ12Bot and Ahrefsbot are still around?! I have them blacklisted since… At least 2012 now, I think?

    I usually don’t really evaluate which bots might or might not be around anymore and still keep the rules for them, LOL