[Roark66]

This is a bit silly. Slowing down, yes, but blocking? People who *really* want that content will find a way and this will hit everyone else instead that will have to do silly riddles before following every link or run crypto mining for them before being shown the content .

I recently went to a big local auction site on which I buy frequently and I got one of these "we detected unusual traffic from your network" messages. And "prove you're human". Which was followed by "you completed the capcha in 0.4s your IP is banned". Really? Am I supposed to slow down my browsing now? I tried a different browser, a different OS, logging on,clearing cookies, etc. Same result when I tried a search. It took 4h after contacting their customer service to unblock it. And the explanation was "you're clicking too fast".

At some point it just becomes a farce and the hassle is not worth the content. Also, while my story doesn't involve any bots perhaps a time will come when local LLMs will be good enough that I'll be able to tell one "reorder my cat food" and it will go and do it. Why are they so determined to "stop it" (spoiler, they can't).

For anyone who says LLMs are already capable of ordering cat food I say not so fast. First the cat food has to be on sale/offer (sometimes combined with extras). Second it is supposed to be healthy (no grains) and third the taste needs to be to my cats liking. So far I'm not going to trust a LLM with this.

[picohernandez]

I was chatting with my sister last weekend. As a hobby, she creates and sells wedding invitation and other designs at an online marketplace site called Zazzle. She was telling me all about how that site implemented some automatic bot detection and it sounded like it was a total disaster. Real content creators were getting wrongly flagged as bots and then getting blocked from using the site just for using the most fundamental site functionality, and to make it worse, then it was apparently impossible for them to get past the captcha challenge or whatever it showed next. She forwarded me a link to some support forum discussion about it and it was mindboggling the troubles that some of the content creators there had to go through:

https://community.zazzle.com/t5/technical-issues/bot-test-wo...

My sister said that her sales figures are way down compared to what they used to be and she didn't know if this bot flagger was disrupting real paying customers too. She said it had flagged her a couple of times, although she was luckily able to get past the bot challenge. She has pretty much given up on making and uploading new designs because of what was happening to other content creators there. She's now scared to use the site because she doesn't want to get wrongly locked out of her account.