Comment on Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis
anachronist@midwest.social 4 days ago
People started allowing scrapers because they needed to get in the search engine indexes to get traffic. But getting scraped being a win-win for the scraper and scrapee is long past. Now it’s completely parasitic. The search engines are even going out of their way to not send traffic to organic results.
I wonder if it’s time to start to create an un-indexable “shadow internet.” Block all scraping even the search engines. Maybe put up login walls. How will people find your website? We’ll have to go back to word of mouth, link rings, or the like.
OptimusPrimeDownfall@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
The problem is that you can’t block all scraping. The scrapers make their bots look like regular traffic, so even if you block all known scrapers, there will be tons that just look like humans visiting your site.
delmain@beehaw.org 4 days ago
Collaborative list of basic IP blocks of known scraper hosts.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 2 days ago
They rent IPs, they can look like residential IPs.
I don’t know how these IP services work, but blocking them seems like blocking AWS - suddenly you didn’t just block telegram but various websites and services don’t work anymore.
OptimusPrimeDownfall@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
changing IPs is very easy.