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770 points ta988 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.446s | source
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markerz ◴[] 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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candlemas ◴[] No.42552437[source]
The biggest offenders for my website have always been from China.
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1. lanstin ◴[] No.42578372[source]
Or invisible text to humans about such topics.