Fuck AI @lemmy.world potatoguy @potato-guy.space 3d ago

Now even my personal instance is infested by these AI crawlers

It's impossible, i got this instance to just see lemmy from my own instance, but no, it was slow as hell the whole week, i got new pods, put postgres on a different pod, pictrs on another, etc.

But it was slow as hell. I didn't know what it was until a few hours before now. 500 GETs in a MINUTE by ClaudeBot and GPTBot, wth is this? why? I blocked the user agents, etc, using a blocking extension on NGINX and now it works.

WHY? So google can say that you should eat glass?

Life is now hell, if before at least someone could upload a website, now even that is painfull.

Sorry for the rant.

24 comments

So I just had a look at your robots.txt:

User-Agent: * Disallow: /login Disallow: /login_reset Disallow: /settings Disallow: /create_community Disallow: /create_post Disallow: /create_private_message Disallow: /inbox Disallow: /setup Disallow: /admin Disallow: /password_change Disallow: /search/ Disallow: /modlog Crawl-delay: 60

You explicitly allow searching your content by bots... That's likely one of the reasons why you get bot traffic.
- AI crawlers ignore robots.txt. The only way to get them to stop is with active counter measures.
You can enable Private Instance in your admin settings, this will mean only logged in users can see content. This will prevent AI scrapers from slowing down your instance as all they'll see is an empty homepage, so no DB calls. As long as you're on 0.19.11, federation will still work.
- Enabled, thanks for the tip!
- Same for Mbin.
Patience, AI crash bubble burst will be soon.
- It won't crash soon, sorry Charlie. Maybe in like 2 - 5 years, but honestly I don't think there will ever be a "crash", just less ai buzzwords in everything
- 🤞
At some point they're going to try to evade detection to continue scraping the web. The cat and mouse game continues except now the "pirates" are big tech.
- They already do. ("They" meaning AI generally, I don't know about Claude or ChatGPT's bots specifically). There are a number of tools server admins can use to help deal with this.
  
  See also:
  
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/
  
  https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
  
  https://anubis.techaro.lol/
  
  these solutions have the side effect of making the bots stay on your site longer and generate more traffic. it's not for everyone.
  
  https://zadzmo.org/ is dead already and arstechnica is writing about them so...
Anubis + Nepenthes is the answer.
- Article for whoever was unaware like me.
- Does this work too? https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/
You can either use Cloudflare(proprietary) or anubis (Foss)
- Don't do this
  
  Why?
Cloudflare has pretty good protection against this, but I totally understand not wanting to use Cloudflare
Just cache. Read only traffic should add negligible load to your server. Or you're doing something horribly wrong
- They are 1 cpu and 1 gb of ram pods, postgres goes to 100% cpu on 500 requests per minute, after i put the NGINX extension, it reduced to at max 10%. On weaker servers, these bots make hell on earth, not the config.
  
  Load should be near zero for reads.
Haha, just wait when you get ddosed by anonymous user agents. I have been there.

I'm talking 40k requests per 5 seconds.

24 comments