this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…

top 25 comments
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[–] CoreLabJoe@piefed.ca 14 points 4 hours ago

Blocking them locally is one way, but if you're already using cloudflare there's a nice way to do it UPSTREAM so it's not eating any of your resources.

You can do geofencing/blocking and bot-blocking via Cloudflare:
https://corelab.tech/cloudflarept2/

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 37 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It's already hard enough for self-hosters and small online communities to deal with spam from fleshbags, now we're being swarmed by clankers. I have a little Mediawiki to document my ~~deranged maladaptive daydreams~~ worldbuilding and conlanging projects, and the only traffic besides me is likely AI crawlers.

I hate this so much. It's not enough that huge centralized platforms have the network effect on their side, they have to drown our quiet little corners of the web under a whelming flood of soulless automata.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 13 points 4 hours ago

Anubis is supposed to filter out and block all those bots from accessing your webpage.

Iocaine, nepenthes, and/or madore's book of infinity are intended to redirect them into a maze of randomly generated bullshit, which still consumes resources but is intended to poison the bots' training data.

So pick your poison

[–] e8CArkcAuLE@piefed.social 25 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

that’s the kind of shit we pollute our air and water for…and properly seal and drive home the fuckedness of our future and planet.

i totally get you sending them to nepenthes though.

[–] Thorry@feddit.org 29 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah I had the same thing. All of a sudden the load on my server was super high and I thought there was a huge issue. So I looked at the logs and saw an AI crawler absolutely slamming my server. I blocked it, so it only got 403 responses but it kept on slamming. So I blocked the IPs it was coming from in iptables, that helped a lot. My little server got about 10000 times the normal traffic.

I sorta get they want to index stuff, but why absolutely slam my server to death? Fucking assholes.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 28 minutes ago (1 children)

My best guess is that they don't just index things, but rather download straight from the internet when they need fresh training data. They can't really cache the whole internet after all...

[–] Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 18 minutes ago

Bingo, modern datasets are a list of URL's with metadata rather than the files themselves. Every new team/individual wanting to work with the dataset becomes another DDoS participant.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 86 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There's usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.

If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.

[–] Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 70 points 7 hours ago (2 children)
[–] timestatic@feddit.org 7 points 3 hours ago

This... is fucking amazing

[–] michael@piefed.chrisco.me 38 points 6 hours ago

Oh interesting! Ive done something similar but not didnt put as much effort.

For me, I just made an unending webpage that would create a link to another page...that would say bullshit. Then it would have another link with more bullshit....etc...etc...And it gets slower as time goes on.

Also made a fail2ban banning IPs that reached a certain number of links down. It worked really well, traffic is down 95% and it does not affect any real human users. Its great :)

I have a robots.txt that should tell them not to look at the sites. But if they dont want to read it, I dont want to be nice.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 26 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Bruh if you had a live stream of this I would subscribe to your only fans.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I… I don’t know how you’d even stream that? A log of pages loaded?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 34 points 6 hours ago

A log of pages loaded?

Keep going I'm almost there...

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 12 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

How do you do that, I'm very interested! Also good to see you Admiral!

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 21 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Thanks!

Mostly there's three steps involved:

  1. Setup Nepenthes to receive the traffic
  2. Perform bot detection on inbound requests (I use a regex list and one is provided below)
  3. Configure traffic rules in your load balancer / reverse proxy to send the detected bot traffic to Nepenthes instead of the actual backend for the service(s) you run.

Here's a rough guide I commented a while back: https://dubvee.org/comment/5198738

Here's the post link at lemmy.world which should have that comment visible: https://lemmy.world/post/40374746

You'll have to resolve my comment link on your instance since my instance is set to private now, but in case that doesn't work, here's the text of it:

So, I set this up recently and agree with all of your points about the actual integration being glossed over.

I already had bot detection setup in my Nginx config, so adding Nepenthes was just changing the behavior of that. Previously, I had just returned either 404 or 444 to those requests but now it redirects them to Nepenthes.

Rather than trying to do rewrites and pretend the Nepenthes content is under my app's URL namespace, I just do a redirect which the bot crawlers tend to follow just fine.

There's several parts to this to keep my config sane. Each of those are in include files.

  • An include file that looks at the user agent, compares it to a list of bot UA regexes, and sets a variable to either 0 or 1. By itself, that include file doesn't do anything more than set that variable. This allows me to have it as a global config without having it apply to every virtual host.

  • An include file that performs the action if a variable is set to true. This has to be included in the server portion of each virtual host where I want the bot traffic to go to Nepenthes. If this isn't included in a virtual host's server block, then bot traffic is allowed.

  • A virtual host where the Nepenthes content is presented. I run a subdomain (content.mydomain.xyz). You could also do this as a path off of your protected domain, but this works for me and keeps my already complex config from getting any worse. Plus, it was easier to integrate into my existing bot config. Had I not already had that, I would have run it off of a path (and may go back and do that when I have time to mess with it again).

The map-bot-user-agents.conf is included in the http section of Nginx and applies to all virtual hosts. You can either include this in the main nginx.conf or at the top (above the server section) in your individual virtual host config file(s).

The deny-disallowed.conf is included individually in each virtual hosts's server section. Even though the bot detection is global, if the virtual host's server section does not include the action file, then nothing is done.

Files

map-bot-user-agents.conf

Note that I'm treating Google's crawler the same as an AI bot because....well, it is. They're abusing their search position by double-dipping on the crawler so you can't opt out of being crawled for AI training without also preventing it from crawling you for search engine indexing. Depending on your needs, you may need to comment that out. I've also commented out the Python requests user agent. And forgive the mess at the bottom of the file. I inherited the seed list of user agents and haven't cleaned up that massive regex one-liner.

# Map bot user agents
## Sets the $ua_disallowed variable to 0 or 1 depending on the user agent. Non-bot UAs are 0, bots are 1

map $http_user_agent $ua_disallowed {
    default 		0;
    "~PerplexityBot"	1;
    "~PetalBot"		1;
    "~applebot"		1;
    "~compatible; zot"	1;
    "~Meta"		1;
    "~SurdotlyBot"	1;
    "~zgrab"		1;
    "~OAI-SearchBot"	1;
    "~Protopage"	1;
    "~Google-Test"	1;
    "~BacklinksExtendedBot" 1;
    "~microsoft-for-startups" 1;
    "~CCBot"		1;
    "~ClaudeBot"	1;
    "~VelenPublicWebCrawler"	1;
    "~WellKnownBot"	1;
    #"~python-requests"	1;
    "~bitdiscovery"	1;
    "~bingbot"		1;
    "~SemrushBot" 	1;
    "~Bytespider" 	1;
    "~AhrefsBot" 	1;
    "~AwarioBot"	1;
#    "~Poduptime" 	1;
    "~GPTBot" 		1;
    "~DotBot"	 	1;
    "~ImagesiftBot"	1;
    "~Amazonbot"	1;
    "~GuzzleHttp" 	1;
    "~DataForSeoBot" 	1;
    "~StractBot"	1;
    "~Googlebot"	1;
    "~Barkrowler"	1;
    "~SeznamBot"	1;
    "~FriendlyCrawler"	1;
    "~facebookexternalhit" 1;
    "~*(?i)(80legs|360Spider|Aboundex|Abonti|Acunetix|^AIBOT|^Alexibot|Alligator|AllSubmitter|Apexoo|^asterias|^attach|^BackDoorBot|^BackStreet|^BackWeb|Badass|Bandit|Baid|Baiduspider|^BatchFTP|^Bigfoot|^Black.Hole|^BlackWidow|BlackWidow|^BlowFish|Blow|^BotALot|Buddy|^BuiltBotTough|
^Bullseye|^BunnySlippers|BBBike|^Cegbfeieh|^CheeseBot|^CherryPicker|^ChinaClaw|^Cogentbot|CPython|Collector|cognitiveseo|Copier|^CopyRightCheck|^cosmos|^Crescent|CSHttp|^Custo|^Demon|^Devil|^DISCo|^DIIbot|discobot|^DittoSpyder|Download.Demon|Download.Devil|Download.Wonder|^dragonfl
y|^Drip|^eCatch|^EasyDL|^ebingbong|^EirGrabber|^EmailCollector|^EmailSiphon|^EmailWolf|^EroCrawler|^Exabot|^Express|Extractor|^EyeNetIE|FHscan|^FHscan|^flunky|^Foobot|^FrontPage|GalaxyBot|^gotit|Grabber|^GrabNet|^Grafula|^Harvest|^HEADMasterSEO|^hloader|^HMView|^HTTrack|httrack|HTT
rack|htmlparser|^humanlinks|^IlseBot|Image.Stripper|Image.Sucker|imagefetch|^InfoNaviRobot|^InfoTekies|^Intelliseek|^InterGET|^Iria|^Jakarta|^JennyBot|^JetCar|JikeSpider|^JOC|^JustView|^Jyxobot|^Kenjin.Spider|^Keyword.Density|libwww|^larbin|LeechFTP|LeechGet|^LexiBot|^lftp|^libWeb|
^likse|^LinkextractorPro|^LinkScan|^LNSpiderguy|^LinkWalker|msnbot|MSIECrawler|MJ12bot|MegaIndex|^Magnet|^Mag-Net|^MarkWatch|Mass.Downloader|masscan|^Mata.Hari|^Memo|^MIIxpc|^NAMEPROTECT|^Navroad|^NearSite|^NetAnts|^Netcraft|^NetMechanic|^NetSpider|^NetZIP|^NextGenSearchBot|^NICErs
PRO|^niki-bot|^NimbleCrawler|^Nimbostratus-Bot|^Ninja|^Nmap|nmap|^NPbot|Offline.Explorer|Offline.Navigator|OpenLinkProfiler|^Octopus|^Openfind|^OutfoxBot|Pixray|probethenet|proximic|^PageGrabber|^pavuk|^pcBrowser|^Pockey|^ProPowerBot|^ProWebWalker|^psbot|^Pump|python-requests\/|^Qu
eryN.Metasearch|^RealDownload|Reaper|^Reaper|^Ripper|Ripper|Recorder|^ReGet|^RepoMonkey|^RMA|scanbot|SEOkicks-Robot|seoscanners|^Stripper|^Sucker|Siphon|Siteimprove|^SiteSnagger|SiteSucker|^SlySearch|^SmartDownload|^Snake|^Snapbot|^Snoopy|Sosospider|^sogou|spbot|^SpaceBison|^spanne
r|^SpankBot|Spinn4r|^Sqworm|Sqworm|Stripper|Sucker|^SuperBot|SuperHTTP|^SuperHTTP|^Surfbot|^suzuran|^Szukacz|^tAkeOut|^Teleport|^Telesoft|^TurnitinBot|^The.Intraformant|^TheNomad|^TightTwatBot|^Titan|^True_Robot|^turingos|^TurnitinBot|^URLy.Warning|^Vacuum|^VCI|VidibleScraper|^Void
EYE|^WebAuto|^WebBandit|^WebCopier|^WebEnhancer|^WebFetch|^Web.Image.Collector|^WebLeacher|^WebmasterWorldForumBot|WebPix|^WebReaper|^WebSauger|Website.eXtractor|^Webster|WebShag|^WebStripper|WebSucker|^WebWhacker|^WebZIP|Whack|Whacker|^Widow|Widow|WinHTTrack|^WISENutbot|WWWOFFLE|^
WWWOFFLE|^WWW-Collector-E|^Xaldon|^Xenu|^Zade|^Zeus|ZmEu|^Zyborg|SemrushBot|^WebFuck|^MJ12bot|^majestic12|^WallpapersHD)" 1;

}

deny-disallowed.conf

# Deny disallowed user agents
if ($ua_disallowed) { 
    # This redirects them to the Nepenthes domain. So far, pretty much all the bot crawlers have been happy to accept the redirect and crawl the tarpit continuously 
	return 301 https://content.mydomain.xyz/;
}

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you! I'm going to start playing with this and see what I can figure out! I'll be referencing this frequently!

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Maybe I should flesh it out into an actual guide. The Nepenthes docs are "meh" at best and completely gloss over integrating it into your stack.

You'll also need to give it corpus text to generate slop from. I used transcripts from 4 or 5 weird episodes of Voyager (let's be honest: shit got weird on Voyager lol), mixed with some Jack Handy quotes and a few transcripts of Married...with Children episodes.

https://content.dubvee.org/ is where that bot traffic lands up if you want to see what I'm feeding them.

Docs would be helpful, I can't find much of anything, I think you honestly did the best writeup.

Star Trek quotes is hilarious and perfect!

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

That sounds like iocaine and the book of infinity

[–] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 hours ago

Vendetta 1800

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

And what was the reason for blocking them? What is unbearable?

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 minutes ago

They cause a huge amount of load, deteriorating the service for everyone else. I'm also guessing the time ranges in the graph, where there's no data, is when OP's server crashed from the load and had to restart.

That kind of shit can easily trigger alerting and will look like a DDoS attack. I would be pissed, too, if I dropped everything to see why my server is going down and it's not even proper criminals, but rather just some silicon valley cunts.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 points 9 minutes ago

it's pretty rare for dumbasses to point themselves out these days.

you're doing gods work son. keep it up!

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz -1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 4 minutes ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP Internet Protocol
nginx Popular HTTP server

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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