Comment on The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess
Gaywallet@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Definitely something I’ve observed even here. Luckily we get few applications and there is a report button, but I share the author’s frustration and the author’s jaded view of a limited timeline on services such as ours being tenable. Eventually it will be trivially easy to flood this place with slop.
theangriestbird@beehaw.org 2 days ago
Question: what would happen if the server implemented something like Anubis on the application and/or create post pages? Would that not block most bots from completing these forms? Is that just not feasible at our scale?
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I think Anubis is really focused on scraper-bots feeding AI models, rather than posting bots. It’s based on requests to non-standard endpoints in your own app, which you specify for Anubis in a couple places (e.g. leaving out of /robots.txt or /.well-known).
If you’re using e.g. a python bot that uses headless chromium executing JS to post stuff, you’re probably going to code in known-good endpoints for comments and posts, rather than hitting random ones like a scraper bot would.
Anubis is good for stopping the n-request-per-second spamming of scrapers, but not so much for just blocking non-human bots that post at normal rates.