[wittyusername]

My favorite thing to do was to detect a bot and then show the bot a parallel dataset I'd developed of bogus information. Instead of hitting a block and working its way around it, competitors scraped a bunch of slightly warbled nonsense data. Have fun with that gang! Also made it super duper easy to see who'd try to steal our data.

[peterangular]

As someone on the other side of the game: this is incredibly effective and can be near-impossible for me to figure out you're feeding me BS data.

I have also done this as an anti-botting tactic myself though and it can get pretty complicated to setup properly unless you're doing the low-tech "feed these networks BS data" list.

[madamelic]

That's really, really funny.

I would absolutely love to see that as someone who scrapes sites. It would make me smile immensely to see the trolling.

[cdoxsey]

Also known as a honeypot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing).

[Can_Not]

Actually, better terminology would be Honeytoken, Trap Street, and/or Fictitious Entry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeytoken

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

[ianandrich]

I really like this approach to handling bots.