[Bender]

For me it's just a fun exercise to see what generalizations I can make about bots that botters can not really avoid or code around such as javascript. Yeah this blog is all precompressed static content in a ram disk. I'm sure it could handle a few hundred thousand requests per second. This is to show methods people could use on their forums, chan sites, chat servers, etc... Every option is optional and tunable. Any option people consider should be tested on a test server. People could just point and laugh if they so desired and that works for me too.

[Bender]

As of now roughly 4661 real humans can reach it. 9 people can not reach it. A few of those 9 I expect to be blocked being on VPN's that egress data-centers.

I could improve this by moving most of the blocking to a demo site so the article is easier to access. I will do that. I will also update some of the nginx ACL's to what I am currently using that explain to the botters what is out of place.

[Barbing]

Bender, even got yourself a great username. One of the most responsive authors in memory.

[Bender]

Thankyou. It's a fun topic for me. Hopefully others will find it interesting to tinker and experiment with as well.

[Bender]

As of now 6622 real humans made it through and a small number of what look to be bots. Curious if any of these people will try their own experiments on this topic.

[milkshakes]

i guess the thing i'm most confused about is what is the higher level goal here. 1 in 8 humans on the planet are experiencing the "web" through chatgpt alone. many have migrated to purely agentic workflows.

is the goal for your content to just be invisible to this growing population? is the expectation that all of this is just a fad, which will fade away? what is the end game to the tactics you have outlined? what is the strategy?

[Bender]

I like those ideas. If people are truly operating purely through LLM's then I am fine with being partitioned from them. The LLM operators will provide their reality and their truth. This is all for low trust internet-wide access.

For smaller higher trust communities I don't do any of this. Rather we use basic authentication to keep bots and strangers off the services all together and then regular user accounts on forums and such. That is where strategy comes into play and has been working well for some time.

[milkshakes]

i guess what i'm curious about is where you would draw the line, and why.

how do you define a user agent? is it desirable or not for users to be able to discover and access resources and communities on the internet using the tools, formats, and workflows that they prefer?

are search bots desirable?

the internet wayback machine?

how do you feel about browser extensions and greasemonkey scripts?

[Bender]

I do not define user-agents, they announce themselves and present a particular behavior. I let them define their behavior and I respond accordingly.

I have no need for search bots personally. If I had a complex site I would build my own search feature. If it was a commercial site I would pay for advertising on popular sites that were of related categories.

Wayback is fun to play with but it's just a toy to me. There is no concept of domain ownership. Most of the snapshots of the domain I am using were from when someone else rented it. They claim to respect robots.txt but that is not entirely true. They crawl and save content even if a site says not to and as soon as the site is offline and robots.txt is no longer accessible they will display all the archived content. This means a person has to park their domain on a server containing a robots.txt that matches their intentions.

Browser extensions are mostly invisible. What is obvious to me is when people are using "reader" applications as web clients. They should be concerned more than me. They are reading random sites run by strangers using apps that may or may not have been battle hardened, reviewed by third party penetration testers and so on. Some of them are vibe coded in unsafe languages.

[razorbeamz]

Do you have a source for those numbers?

[jolux]

ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users.

[Bender]

I am an active user of Claude but I do not live my life through that thing. I try to get it to answer questions that it does not want to answer. The only questions it seems to answer without hesitation are technical in nature. In the entire existence of my account I have started 9 chats.

More interesting to me was that Alexa on Amazon Prime answered all my questions without hesitation or disclaimers but once I have my answers I close that tab.

[somenameforme]

This is definitely a 2026 type comment, but I'm very surprised that it's so "low." GPT is the most well known brand and it's the one that seemingly 100% of kids use to "assist" on their homework and other exercises from grade school to college. One would think that alone would already take you well over a billion.

[razorbeamz]

This does not mean that all billion of them are using ChatGPT as their main interface with the internet.

[watwut]

I am monthly active user, absolutely do not experience web through ChatGPT alone and frankly, dont mind ChatGPT being cut off stuff. AI companies forcing themselves as a middle man is not a good thing.

Whoever using purely agentic worflow is not my concern. Just like people who read only physical book, learn only from podcasts or watch only netflix movies.

There is zero reason for the rest of us to worry about filling free data to companies that try to make themselves monopolies.

[dminik]

I wonder what the click through rate is for the source links. Based on what I've been hearing, it's very low. And that's if the particular LLM/interface/answer even bothers to add them.

If the bots are eating your site traffic and users, what's the point of allowing them in?

[AussieWog93]

Not pointing and laughing, just wondering why (since I see so many posts about this). Sounds like it's just for the thrill of the game, which is completely valid.

[Bender]

Thrill of the game is a great way to put it.

[inigyou]

I wish it was framed as "silly ways to block bots" then so that people wouldn't take it as a recommendation