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Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis
(weirdgloop.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Technology
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People started allowing scrapers because they needed to get in the search engine indexes to get traffic. But getting scraped being a win-win for the scraper and scrapee is long past. Now it's completely parasitic. The search engines are even going out of their way to not send traffic to organic results.
I wonder if it's time to start to create an un-indexable "shadow internet." Block all scraping even the search engines. Maybe put up login walls. How will people find your website? We'll have to go back to word of mouth, link rings, or the like.
The problem is that you can't block all scraping. The scrapers make their bots look like regular traffic, so even if you block all known scrapers, there will be tons that just look like humans visiting your site.
Collaborative list of basic IP blocks of known scraper hosts.
They rent IPs, they can look like residential IPs.
I don't know how these IP services work, but blocking them seems like blocking AWS - suddenly you didn't just block telegram but various websites and services don't work anymore.
/edit: the article goes into this and also blocking
They spoof their ip now
IP addresses can't really be spoofed, but there are other issues that make IP-based filtering impractical. (VPNs, IPv6, malicious reporting, shared IPs, NAT, etc)
changing IPs is very easy.