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Currently Anubis seems to be the standard for slowing down scrapers
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
There are also various poison and tarpit systems which will serve scrapers infinite garbage text or data designed to aggressively corrupt the models they're training. Basically you can be as aggressive as you want. Your site will get scraped and incorporated into someone's model at the end of the day, but you can show them down and make it hurt.
Isn't fail2ban a possibility too? I created a filter for chatgpt and some others, and it feels like its working. My radicale server is my only free acessable service but it comes with a small webgui and so the bots showed up. I have no clue if the bot gets a fraction of your site each time it shows up, but seemingly the ban happens within 300ms when I remember correct. So it wouldn't be that much of information...
When setting the retry to 1 it will ban at the first sight.
A big issue is that this works for bots that announce themselves as such, but there's lots that pretend to be regular users, with fake user agents and ips selected from a random pool with each ip only sending like 1-3 request/day, but overall many thousands of requests. In my experience a lot of them are from huawei and tencent cloud/ASN
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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