Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal f...
pod.geraspora.de
Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angry. In the last 60 days, the diaspora* web assets received 11.3 million requests. That equals to 2.19 req/s - which honestly isn't that much. I mean, it's more than your average personal blog, but nothing that my infrastructure shouldn't be able to handle. However, here's what's grinding my fucking gears. Looking at the top user agent statistics, there are the leaders: 2.78 million requests - or 24.6% of all traffic - is coming from Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot). 1.69 million reuqests - 14.9% - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonb...
  • Hirom@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    12 hours ago

    In my experience with bots, a portion of them obey robots.txt, but it’s tricky to find the user agent string that some bots react to.

    So I recommend having a robots.txt that not only target specific bots, but also tell all bots to avoid specific paths/queries.

    Example for dokuwiki

    User-agent: *
Noindex: /lib/
Disallow: /_export/
Disallow: /user/
Disallow: /*?do=
Disallow: /*&do=
Disallow: /*?rev=
Disallow: /*&rev=
    • irelephant [he/him]🍭@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Would it be possible to detect the gptbot (or similar) of their user agent, and server them different data?

      Can they detect that?

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        yes, you can match on user agent, and then conditionally serve them other stuff (most webservers are fine with this). nepenthes and iocaine are the current preferred/recommended servers to serve them bot mazes

        the thing is that the crawlers will also lie (openai definitely doesn’t publish all its own source IPs, I’ve verified this myself), and will attempt a number of workarounds (like using residential proxies too)

        • Hirom@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Generating plausible-looking gibberish require resources. Giving any kind of response to these bots is a waste of resources, even if it’s giberish.

          My current approach is to have a robots.txt for bots than honor it. And drop all traffic during 24h for IPs used by bots that ignore robots.txt or misbehave.