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AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

(pod.geraspora.de)
770 points ta988 | 1 comments | 30 Dec 24 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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markerz ◴[30 Dec 24 17:07 UTC] No.42551173[source]▶
One of my websites was absolutely destroyed by Meta's AI bot: Meta-ExternalAgent https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-...

It seems a bit naive for some reason and doesn't do performance back-off the way I would expect from Google Bot. It just kept repeatedly requesting more and more until my server crashed, then it would back off for a minute and then request more again.

My solution was to add a Cloudflare rule to block requests from their User-Agent. I also added more nofollow rules to links and a robots.txt but those are just suggestions and some bots seem to ignore them.

Cloudflare also has a feature to block known AI bots and even suspected AI bots: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... As much as I dislike Cloudflare centralization, this was a super convenient feature.

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1. PeterStuer ◴[02 Jan 25 08:33 UTC] No.42572754[source]▶
Most administrators have no idea or no desire to correctly configure Cloudflare, so they just slap it on the whole site by default and block all the legitimate access to e.g. rss feeds.