this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Privacy

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[–] Asudox 106 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Block? Nope, robots.txt does not block the bots. It's just a text file that says: "Hey robot X, please do not crawl my website. Thanks :>"

[–] [email protected] 58 points 4 months ago (7 children)

I disallow a page in my robots.txt and ip-ban everyone who goes there. Thats pretty effective.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Did you ban it in your humans.txt too?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

humans typically don't visit [website]/fdfjsidfjsidojfi43j435345 when there's no button that links to it

[–] Avatar_of_Self 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I used to do this on one of my sites that was moderately popular in the 00's. I had a link hidden via javascript, so a user couldn't click it (unless they disabled javascript and clicked it), though it was hidden pretty well for that too.

IP hits would be put into a log and my script would add a /24 of that subnet into my firewall. I allowed specific IP ranges for some search engines.

Anyway, it caught a lot of bots. I really just wanted to stop automated attacks and spambots on the web front.

I also had a honeypot port that basically did the same thing. If you sent packets to it, your /24 was added to the firewall for a week or so. I think I just used netcat to add to yet another log and wrote a script to add those /24's to iptables.

I did it because I had so much bad noise on my logs and spambots, it was pretty crazy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

This thread has provided genius ideas I somehow never thought of, and I'm totally stealing them for my sites lol.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I LOVE VISITING FDFJSIDFJSIDOJFI435345 ON HUMAN WEBSITES, IT IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE HUMAN HOBBIES. ~~🤖~~👨

[–] LazaroFilm 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Imagine posting a rule that says "do not walk on the grass" among other rules and then banning anyone who steps on the grass with the thought process that if they didn't obey that rule they were likely disobeying other rules. Except the grass is somewhere that no one would see unless they actually read the rules. The rules were the only place that mentioned that grass.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Is the page linked in the site anywhere, or just mentioned in the robots.txt file?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Excellent.

I think I might be able to create a fail2ban rule for that.

[–] Asudox 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Not sure if that is effective at all. Why would a crawler check the robots.txt if it's programmed to ignore it anyways?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

cause many crawlers seem to explicitly crawl "forbidden" sites

[–] Crashumbc 3 points 4 months ago

Google and script kiddies copying code...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

You could also place the same page as a hidden link on your home page.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I doubt it'd be possible in most any way due to lack of server control, but I'm definitely gonna have to look this up to see if anything similar could be done on a neocities site.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago
[–] spookedintownsville 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Can this be done without fail2ban?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Should be able to do it with Crowdsec

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] spookedintownsville 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How did you do it? Looking to do this on my own site.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

My websites Backend is written in flask so it was pretty easy to add

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago

Robots.txt is honor-based and Big Data has no honor.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunate indeed.

“Can AI bots ignore my robots.txt file? Well-established companies such as Google and OpenAI typically adhere to robots.txt protocols. But some poorly designed AI bots will ignore your robots.txt.”

[–] breadsmasher 23 points 4 months ago

typically adhere. but they don’t have to follow it.

poorly designed AI bots

Is it a poor design if its explicitly a design choice to ignore it entirely to scrape as much data as possible? Id argue its more AI bots designed to scrape everything regardless of robots.txt. That’s the intention. Asshole design vs poor design.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is why I block in a htaccess:

# Bot Agent Block Rule
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (BOTNAME|BOTNAME2|BOTNAME3) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) - [F,L]