I've seen people suggesting and using Anubis, haven't used it myself though.
I especially love the irony of Anubis using yesterday's hype thing to combat today's.
i tried Anubis and it works great the only issue is it wont support multiple subdomains
Second Anubis, just finished by setup yesterday i have it of a oracle cloud frre tier vps, which depending on the domain routes the traffic to services hosted on the vps itself or to my server ar home. Relatively easy to setup, blocks most requests with very few false positives (one of which for example it would aggressively challenge by thunderbird trying to reach my baikal instance). I set a bit more aggresive rules than default (i also block googlebot and bingbot, since i received a bit more requests than I'd like). In like 10 hours it straight up denied about 5000 requests from the ai-catchall ruleset (mostly amazonbot) and challenged about 10000, mostly from a block of IPs in singapore, some of the hosts having the user agent of a Macintosh with PowerPC. They all sure love to explore the public repos on my git server.
I'm in the process of changing servers for an upgrade, the old one still hosting more services while I setup the new one. The old one now does run audibly quiter. I don't even want to think how much electricity went wasted because of those bots
You probably don't need me to tell you, but keep good backups. Friend of mine recently had his account nuked without any reason given, and without the possibility of recourse.
That's too bad. Luckily i keep just a couple of docker compose stacks there. But I should start backing them up, that vps is the only thing I don't backup
I have a dumb question.. what is preventing the crawlers from just eating the shit and just burn though the energy to get through the computational task?
It'll still slow them down and reduce load on your server. I also think many of these crawlers focus on volume; time spent computing the hash is time not spent crawling someone else's site.
You need yo block the alibaba subnets primarily. In my experience this is where most of them originate
Anubis is the name of the tool. Also, Cloudflare just announced they have something against AI scrapers.
ive been using Anubis my only issue is i would have to run more then one instance and i dont like cloudflare personaly
does anubis not work?
i can only get it to protect one container. i have 3 that i need protected and i cant figure out how to run more then one instance of it.
Nephentes that shit. Poison every scraper until they start respecting robot.txt. Purposefully use llm.txt to trap the fuckers.
this is really awesome but i use a vps so i dont know how they would feel about this being deployed
You most likely pay for a maximum CPU capacity and your Server cant go above that no matter what you run. Your vps provider doesn't care what that CPU power is used for.
However with limited resources, the tarpit might use up all CPU power and the rest of the webserver will crawl to a halt.
I've seen people mention Anubis, the other one I heard about in a blog post that's maybe worth looking into is go-away.
If you're able to, use GeoIP ranges to only allow access from the countries you want.
That immediately limits a lot of everything
Then - again if you're able to - use a block list that covers known scrapers in case they're in your country.
I use pfBlockerNG on my pfSense firewall for exactly this.
Well, someone had great idea to use zipbombs. I saw it somewhere but I don’t remember where.
Anubis has this built in if it detects bots it turns the diffuclty to impossible
If nginx, here's an open-source blocker/honeypot: https://github.com/raminf/RoboNope-nginx
If you have it set up to be proxied or hosted by Cloudflare, they have their own solution: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/
ill check robonope out seems promising
Wern't there a few AI maze projects in the works? I wonder if running one of those for a bit will cause you to be added to an ignore list, clearly they dont respect your robots file.
Tar pits I think is the term they use to pollute AI data.
crowdsec is arguably not completely open source, but I'm very satisfied with it.
The scraper blocklist on crowdsec requires a paid subscription, though, or did you find another workaround?
I just realized an interesting thing - if I use Gemini, and tell it to do deep research, it actually goes to the websites it knows/finds, and looks up the content to provide up-to-date answers. So, some of those AI crawlers are actually not crawlers, but actual users who just use AI instead of coming directly to the site.
Soo... blocking AI completely could also potentially reduce exposure, especially as more and more people use AI to basically do searches instead of browsing themselves. That would also explain the amount of requests daily - could be simply different users using AI to research for some topic.
Point is, you should evaluate if the AI requests are just proxies of real users, and blocking AI blocks real users from knowing your site exists.
some of those AI crawlers are actually not crawlers, but actual users who just use AI instead of coming directly to the site. Soo.. blocking AI completely could also potentially reduce exposure.
Normally, websites want users to come to their site, instead of an AI search engine "stealing" the content and presenting it as it's own. Yes, AI search engines are more convenient for the user, but in the end it will discourage website creators and thereby cut of it's own "food supply".
What's bothering you?
its the strain of it i mostly run instances and frontends so the training is not a huge problem
the keyword you need is "DDoS protection" i guess
it keeps the server from getting overloaded due to too many requests
In my case I use https://www.bunkerweb.io/ as my proxy for that, but there are other tools like for example https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!