[scoofy]

Honeypots in JS and CSS

I've been dealing with this over at golfcourse.wiki for the last couple years. It fucking sucks. The good news is that all the idiot scrapers who don't follow robots.txt seem to fall for the honeypots pretty easily.

Make the honeypot disappear with a big CSS file, make another one disappear with a JS file. Humans aren't aware they are there, bots won't avoid them. Programming a bot to look for visible links instead of invisible links is challenging. The problem is these programmers are ubiquitous, and since they are ubiquitous they're not going to be geniuses.

Honeypot -> autoban