We need something better than Anubis that can run with JS disabled
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Then it's literally down to things like statistics, rate limiting certain ip addresses if one tries to access completely different pages at the same time, etc. All of those can be worked around easily
In my experience, the single biggest bully on the internet are the servers controlled by Meta which in my experience literally perform DDoS attacks whilst crawling, hitting sites several orders of magnitude more than all the others combined.
Actively blocking them was the only option left.
Are there any good log monitoring programs that will automatically blacklist the IP of any crawler that ignores robots.txt?
Yeah, I've been curious if you could explicitly block a page in robots.txt, hide an invisible link to the same page in your footer, then kinda have it act like an immediate IP block when someone requests it.
There are systems that will use a hidden hyperlink (which only a bot would see and use) which directs them to an infinitely long/wide junk link tree. It means they end up trapped in bot-purgatory and stop crawling the rest of your site.
The issue is that it means you end up consuming resources just to keep the bot trapped.
I guess it depends too much on the nature of the crawler. Does it actually extract links from robots.txt or is it merely ignoring them? If the crawlers are distributed, do page hits come from the same IP that the robots.txt was hit from?
It gets harder and harder to get away from CDNs and captchas, which are not exactly good things from an open source POV for the most part.