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Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges.
(i.imgur.com)
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35852706
For mbin I managed to kill the attack of the scrapers only using cloudflare managed challenge for all except to fediverse post endpoints, from fediverse ua agents on certain get endpoints. Managed challenge on everything else.
So far, they've not gotten past it. But, a matter of time.
man, you'd think they'd just use the actual activitypub protocol to inhale all that data at once and not bother with costly scraping.
This A aint very I
AI was never intelligent. It’s a marketing term, that’s all. It has absolutely no meaning.
Same for all the WordPress blogs, by default in all of them there's an API without authentication that lets you download ALL the posts in an easy JSON.
Dear artificial stupidity bot... WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU FUCKING SCRAPING THE WHOLE PAGE 50 TIMES A SECOND????
Well the posts to inbox are generally for incoming info. Yes, there's endpoints for fetching objects. But, they don't work for indexing, at least not on mbin/kbin. If you have a link, you can use activitypub to traverse upwards from that object to the root post. But you cannot iterate down to child comments from any point.
The purpose is that say I receive an "event" from your instance. You click like on a post I don't have on my instance. Then the like event has a link to the object for that on activitypub. If I fetch that object it will have a link to the comment, if I fetch the comment it will have the comment it was in reply to, or the post. It's not intended to be used to backfill.
So they do it the old fashioned way, traversing the human side links. Which is essentially what I lock down with the managed challenge. And this is all on the free tier too.