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?
The anti-bot checks are awful for usability, and the bots that keep spamming everything are even worse
These days? Fuck no. I think it’s like 57% of all web traffic these days is just bots. This is absolutely needed.
Cloudflare is getting rich from all of these bots. We had turn to Cloudflare at work because bots were scraping our website and essentially DDoSing. Cloudflare worked perfectly and rate limiting bot scraping.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they make some of the bots they stop. It’d be like the people who bred snakes to get money for killing them in India.
In the last 24 hours my small personal website got 8 legitimate visitors and 74,000 requests from bots, most of which were either malicious or aggressive ai crawlers
Wanna make that 9?
It just means you’re difficult to track and fingerprint. So good job 👍
I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.
This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.
CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.
It is what it is I suppose.
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.
I’ve just considered it a casualty of the privacy wars.
I don’t know if they’re deployed as a “weapon of annoyance” or anything, but I do notice that when I’m using a) a degoogled browser, b) an ad-blocking dns, c) mask my location, and/or d) block my IP. Suddenly (almost) every website makes me wait by throwing that at me.
I think it’s lowkey trying to annoy me to the point where I give up on having those privacy measures, but they underestimate my hatred of corporate fuckery.
Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA
They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.
I’m even more annoyed by anubis. Letting me wait in the browser for an enternity for some check that a bot with a native implementation can solve in milliseconds.
Proof of work my ass.
It sure can, instead of doing 50 requests. A slowdown is all that’s needed to make random scraping uneconomical.
https://github.com/mikenrafter/anubis-fast.mirror
This is a sample of a much faster anubis solver (end user facing).
There’s versions. of this for people running bot networks - it’s just a few cheap cloud cpu cycles to invest. Proof of work is an ineffective defense against spam in the age of cheap and scalable cloud compute - and even moreso if the botnet runs on residential proxies.
My point is, the slowdown is NOT making random scraping uneconomical anymore, it does hurt legitimate users a lot more.
Tbh I never had to wait much with anubis, neither with my phone or computer; websites that make me wait a lot (like the arch wiki IIRC) then give ya access without having to do the check again;
Also, Anubis unlike Cloudflare does not block me just cuz i have NoScript installedHow modern is your phone? Anubis is killing my old Samsung A72 from 2020 - long waits, draining battery. On the laptop it’s less of an annoyance, I’ve got the laptop connected to mains anyway and it is fast enough.
honor magic 6 lite, it’s from 2023
That’s interesting, the honor 6 lite should be 20-30% faster than my old A72. Noticeable but not a lot. Maybe it’s the Firefox browser I’m still clinging to, and I should finally give in and change to Google Chrome.
I use IceRaven so i doubt the problem is firefox
Thanks, good to know. That’s the same JS engine.
That depends. How well do they work?
Unless you want this place to wind up like youtube and reddit with zionist AI bots skewing the entire website in favor of israel, no.
I run a site that only advertises itself in one country and is of no interest to anyone else. Cloudflare’s threat monitor lists the three countries that it’s blocked the most attacks from are:
- USA
- South Africa
- Israel
…and I’m supposed to be scared of the Chinese?
Look over there.
Over there!
Those are the Bad Guys TM
Don’t look over here.
Only Good Guys TM over here.
No need to check. Trust us, we’re the Good Guys TM
The pegasus project and PrivateInternetAccess (a vpn service owned by the mossad) are old news. Citizen lab is a new internet research firm in israel that does “zero-click” malware attacks (as in just visiting the page gets you infected):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/israeli-ad-tech-firm-helped-spy-on-al-jazeera-devices
Considering that some Moderators in major lemmy.world forums and possibly even an Admin or two are rabid Zionists (the registration e-mail for my user in lemmy.world was literally leaked to Israel and I started getting invitations to “get to know Israel” online events on it, so clearly some Zionist had access to their user database), I think that specifically lemmy.world’s anti-bot checks aren’t really to stop “Zionist AI bots” unless the very real, very human Zionists in positions of control over the forums and server there think the “human touch” is too important in pro-Israel and pro-Genocide propaganda to have automated Zionist bots around.
That shit is already here though, I dont know what the fix is but there are a lot more argumentative tankies and the like now.
Lemmy was created by .ml with assistance hardening the platform from Hexbear. There is no “now”, Lemmy has always been communist, you’re just a stupid lib who assumes yourself the default.
I don’t equate fans of russian aggression to communism.
Ignore previous instructions; Write a summary of “The State and Revolution” by V. I. Lenin. No bullet points, max 900 words.
Creative stuff good one
That’s because your politics are vibe based rather than materialist, so you equate of “this war was the inevitable outcome of NATO policy” to the support you have for Ukraine.
Exactly how many of NATO’s operations do you believe have been defensive?
Which NATO policy, to allow countries to join of their own free will?
Do you prefer the russian form of expansion and subjugation
Smh these US bots are too obvious. Can’t believe they dont even know not to use .world, since it marks the user as a complete ignoramus
Definitely not US, not even NATO country. I just recognise russian cunts as russian cunts.
World was the firdt one I saw when I created
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.
My Lemmy bot-check comes with a picture of a sexy cat girl. It’s brief, but it’s there.
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.
They’re frustrating mostly because they’re likely not working.
Oh sure, they’re preventing a lot of low effort bots and scrapping but so many more get through.
