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?
It’s proportional to the amount of rude AI crawling, from what I’ve heard.
The industry has put every reasonably accessible piece of human writing in their datasets, and are scrounging for the remaining little bits, now. Old, obscure, obsolete books nobody ever reads are apparently a hot item. Your latest blog post is probably worth some fraction of a penny.
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.
Captchas suck. Don’t trust reCaptcha, and avoid Cloudflare captchas.
That said, Techaro’s Anubis is a good thing.
It is that or shutting down your site.
Those fucking bots just keep coming, causing traffic no small or medium site can cope with. So yeah, deal with it.
Im ok with them as long as theyre not demanding input by clicking everything that is a fire post so they can train their ai for free
Seems like a big switch in the last 3-6 months? Even google is making me do stupid captcha when I occasionally use it.
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
Just the “click and hold” ones that take forever and only work 20% of the time. I need a damn good reason to go there, else I say “fuck it” and move on.
Since I use a VPN they are everywhere. Small price to pay.
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.
My Lemmy bot-check comes with a picture of a sexy cat girl. It’s brief, but it’s there.
That’s Techaro’s Anubis. It inconveniences crawlers notably without demanding input from the user.
lemmy.zip only has these if you’re not logged in
Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA
Just a few moments ago I passed an anti-bot check with my VPN on.
Yeah you can pass the check but it’s everywhere. It sucks but I guess that’s the price to pay.
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.
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.
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
Didn’t you get the memo that the Chinese and Russians are the enemy while USA and Israel are the good guys?
Pedo Trump and holocaust netanyahu are our idols in the west, apparently.
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
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.
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
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
yes, including useless captchas… even more so as i know they’re trivially bypassed/workarounded on sophisticated bots
i understand it does block stupid crawlers but still.
