I’m getting really tired of “verify you’re not a bot” checks everywhere.
I understand these checks help prevent bots, but they seem to appear on so many websites now. Does anyone else find them frustrating?
Yes, and the ones that put part of a bicycle into the next square, so it’s not full of bicycle. Are bots supposed to pick or not, it should be more clear if we’re supposed to pick squares with any pixel of a bike, give parameters what percentage of the square’s pixels should contain bike to count as bike.
Anything fighting bots is fine with me, even if it inconveniences me for a few more seconds
I prefer this to the string of sites that just outright block me based on location. Or have permanently banned my IP range without me ever visiting them.
Seems like a complaint a bot would have.
Fuck, so now anyone who’s different is a bot or AI? Seriously, if I were a robot, why would I write a post complaining about websites? If I were AI, I’d have better things to do.
That’s exactly what an AI would say to try to look like a person.
Dude, you’re watching too many science fiction movies. Even though artificial intelligence might be quite advanced these days, if I were a robot I wouldn’t waste my time talking to humans. I’d think of something worse: ending the lives of these poor, brainless mortals. You’re crazy, man :-P
That’s exactly what a robot would say to look like a human.
Fuck you 😾
Man, if the checks feel excessive you’d be astounded to know how the bot frequency feels 😂
Well I’m not a bot so I don’t mind, now aita for spilling wine on someone who wore white to my wedding?
As others have said, they are absolutely necessary in this day and age.
But also the bots are not deliberately targetting lemmy, it’s just that lemmy has unlimited pages to scrape and so the traffic piles up. If your issue is specifically with Lemmy then using an app should help. Many instances also give logged in users a free pass.
I could use an app, but since I don’t know English, I need to use a translator to understand what people are writing.
But I am a bot, why did I see this?
Looks like bot talking …
What’-’
Recently my Agent came back from a research task stating it had to complete various captchas but succeeded, then it reported the results.
I don’t mind them so much, as a concept. But why does Cloudflare, for example, need to verify my humanity on every website? Verify I’m a human once, save the cookie, then i should be marked as human for a period (30 days for example) before being verified against (unless some sus things happen). Why every damn time on every damn page?
Side note, I love the little catgirl one lol she’s so cute
3rd party cookies are supressed to each website on my firefox. No cross cookies.
iirc she’s a jackal
That’s good to know. But either way, I don’t mind her. She’s adorable. And that check is quick, and I have yet seen it pretend to fail (as so many others do… no, I’m going to create a “free” account to view your content once, just because your verification pretended to fail).
preventing bots is hard. What would prevent me of making the bot verification as a human, save the cookie and then put it on my bot?
(unless some sus things happen)
It’s why I added this.
You may not understand just how prevalent bot traffic is. I self-host a small personal website that real people only actually visit once in a blue moon, but I get constant attempts to access the Wordpress admin console (my website isn’t made with Wordpress lol)
Same here. And I don’t even offer a public page.
Have a small website, and the bot traffic is overwhelming. Was slowing down everything, exhaust the resources I was allowed from my hoster and try to access non existent pages. Bots have ruined the Internet.
I’m frustrated by how Lemmy.world treats VPN traffic, too, even if I sympathize with the underlying challenge they face. How do we fix it?
No, but only because I’ve helped run a website recently and you underestimate just how much wasted traffic is from scrapper bots. On our limited bandwidth, it was practically a DDOS attack all the time.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots
Slowly but surely we’re approaching the point where bots make up the most internet traffic, and additionally because of LLMs more and more of the web’s content is slop, which is why the frontier ai companies are no longer just blanket training on all the internet.
My solution reduced 95ish percent of traffic. Bots were hitting my tiny site like mad.
I went from thousands of requests per minute to 10, tops. Bot prevention is a must have.
If bot checks were removed then everyone would be complaining that it’s unusably slow.
It’s easy to block most bots. It’s impossible to block bots that target you specifically. I’m not blocking any bots on my websites, I like it better to optimize performance so that I can serve them all and have a lot of headroom
No, it’s not. Had request from a bot network, always changing ip’s, user agent and request url. There is no pattern there I can block.
I created a bot black hole. Specific recursive link that if the click it three times it blocks the IP. And the link is “click if ai” URL at the bottom. Works like a charm.
No; the traffic i get seems like it had stored my sitemap from ~10 years ago because the requested urls there are long gone, and now tries to guess other url’s with a similar pattern. It does not seem to follow links from the frontpage.
I have fail2ban take care if those. 404s and all that.
That’s fascinating. It almost sounds like they’re training a scraper. Which, really, is far and away the worst possible bot to have.
There surely is ja4 but I recognize it requires some setup
I wish Traefik exposed the ja4 fingerprint. There’s an open issue: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/12421
