After yet another bot scraping wave forcing me to do sysadmin work at 3am, and me ranting about it on lemmy, @self@awful.systems linked me to a post that referenced iocaine which sounded a perfect way to get back on bots that don't respect our resources and time.

At the same time, we recently on-boarded @tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com as an extra sysadmin to reduce the "bus factor" of our instance (say hello), and they graciously offered some spare compute they had lying around. So I thought, since serving iocaine to bots doesn't really require any serious uptime, why not put it those resources to good use.

So after a couple of hours messing up with things, I've now deployed iocaine to protect our instance as well as fediseer. This should hopefully start messing back with these bastards by serving them some surrealistic nonsense I had squirreled away.

If you want to see this in action, set your user agent to GPTBot and visit our instance. If you find yourself trapped in iocaine somehow, just let us know.