AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

Their appetite cannot be quenched, and there is little to no value in giving them access to the content.

I have data... 7d from a single platform with about 30 forums on this instance.

4.8M hits from Claude 390k from Amazon 261k from Data For SEO 148k from Chat GPT

That Claude one! Wowser.

Bots that match this (which is also the list I block on some other forums that are fully private by default):

(?i).(AhrefsBot|AI2Bot|AliyunSecBot|Amazonbot|Applebot|Awario|axios|Baiduspider|barkrowler|bingbot|BitSightBot|BLEXBot|Buck|Bytespider|CCBot|CensysInspect|ChatGPT-User|ClaudeBot|coccocbot|cohere-ai|DataForSeoBot|Diffbot|DotBot|ev-crawler|Expanse|FacebookBot|facebookexternalhit|FriendlyCrawler|Googlebot|GoogleOther|GPTBot|HeadlessChrome|ICC-Crawler|imagesift|img2dataset|InternetMeasurement|ISSCyberRiskCrawler|istellabot|magpie-crawler|Mediatoolkitbot|Meltwater|Meta-External|MJ12bot|moatbot|ModatScanner|MojeekBot|OAI-SearchBot|Odin|omgili|panscient|PanguBot|peer39_crawler|Perplexity|PetalBot|Pinterestbot|PiplBot|Protopage|scoop|Scrapy|Screaming|SeekportBot|Seekr|SemrushBot|SeznamBot|Sidetrade|Sogou|SurdotlyBot|Timpibot|trendictionbot|VelenPublicWebCrawler|WhatsApp|wpbot|xfa1|Yandex|Yeti|YouBot|zgrab|ZoominfoBot).

I am moving to just blocking them all, it's ridiculous.

Everything on this list got itself there by being abusive (either ignoring robots.txt, or not backing off when latency increased).

You know, at this point, I wonder if an allowlist would work better.

I have thought about writing such a thing...

1. A proxy that looks at HTTP Headers and TLS cipher choices

2. An allowlist that records which browsers send which headers and selects which ciphers

3. A dynamic loading of the allowlist into the proxy at some given interval

New browser versions or updates to OSs would need the allowlist updating, but I'm not sure it's that inconvenient and could be done via GitHub so people could submit new combinations.

I'd rather just say "I trust real browsers" and dump the rest.

Also I noticed a far simpler block, just block almost every request whose UA claims to be "compatible".