I’m currently building a personal website and making a smol-version to along with it. The main website will likely live behind Anubis to avoid LLM-scraping and the like.

Since Anubis forces the client to waste compute, this is not very aligned with the smolweb guidelines as I understand them. How do people handle this?

  • algernon@lemmy.ml
    3·
    8 days ago

    I need to join more communities, because I’m noticing these anti-scraper questions way too late.

    I’d like to direct your attention to iocaine. It’s somewhat similar to Anubis in the sense that it sits between your reverse proxy and the real content, but unlike Anubis, it does not use proof of work. It exploits the fact that most of the scrapers are incredibly dumb, and can be trivially detected:

    • Is it in ai.robots.txt’s list? It’s a crawler.
    • Does it have Firefox/ or Chrome/ in the user agent, but sent no sec-fetch-mode header? Pretty much guaranteed to be a crawler, with few exceptions (eg, Googlebot, Bingbot - but I’d classify those as hostile crawlers too)

    Serve garbage or a static page with poisoned URLs to these, and you got rid of 90%+ of the bots. Why the poisoned URLs? Because when they come back riding headless chromes, they usually crawl URLs the dumb bots collected. If you poison those URLs in a way that you can identify them trivially, you can block the headless chromes too, which you wouldn’t be able to detect otherwise. Whether they come through residential proxies or not, as long as their queue is collected by the dumb bots, you can catch them.

    On top of this, to reduce the load on your servers, iocaine can also block requests. It can be configured to serve garbage & poisoned URLs to the dumb bots, and then firewall anything that hits a poisoned URL.

    The false positive rate is surprisingly low.