I’m getting really tired of “verify you’re not a bot” checks everywhere.
I understand these checks help prevent bots, but they seem to appear on so many websites now. Does anyone else find them frustrating?
In the last 24 hours my small personal website got 8 legitimate visitors and 74,000 requests from bots, most of which were either malicious or aggressive ai crawlers
My Lemmy bot-check comes with a picture of a sexy cat girl. It’s brief, but it’s there.
Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA
yes, including useless captchas… even more so as i know they’re trivially bypassed/workarounded on sophisticated bots
i understand it does block stupid crawlers but still.
Unless you want this place to wind up like youtube and reddit with zionist AI bots skewing the entire website in favor of israel, no.
Considering that some Moderators in major lemmy.world forums and possibly even an Admin or two are rabid Zionists (the registration e-mail for my user in lemmy.world was literally leaked to Israel and I started getting invitations to “get to know Israel” online events on it, so clearly some Zionist had access to their user database), I think that specifically lemmy.world’s anti-bot checks aren’t really to stop “Zionist AI bots” unless the very real, very human Zionists in positions of control over the forums and server there think the “human touch” is too important in pro-Israel and pro-Genocide propaganda to have automated Zionist bots around.
I run a site that only advertises itself in one country and is of no interest to anyone else. Cloudflare’s threat monitor lists the three countries that it’s blocked the most attacks from are:
- USA
- South Africa
- Israel
…and I’m supposed to be scared of the Chinese?
Look over there.
Over there!
Those are the Bad Guys TM
Don’t look over here.
Only Good Guys TM over here.
No need to check. Trust us, we’re the Good Guys TM
Didn’t you get the memo that the Chinese and Russians are the enemy while USA and Israel are the good guys?
Pedo Trump and holocaust netanyahu are our idols in the west, apparently.
The pegasus project and PrivateInternetAccess (a vpn service owned by the mossad) are old news. Citizen lab is a new internet research firm in israel that does “zero-click” malware attacks (as in just visiting the page gets you infected):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/israeli-ad-tech-firm-helped-spy-on-al-jazeera-devices
That shit is already here though, I dont know what the fix is but there are a lot more argumentative tankies and the like now.
Lemmy was created by .ml with assistance hardening the platform from Hexbear. There is no “now”, Lemmy has always been communist, you’re just a stupid lib who assumes yourself the default.
I don’t equate fans of russian aggression to communism.
That’s because your politics are vibe based rather than materialist, so you equate of “this war was the inevitable outcome of NATO policy” to the support you have for Ukraine.
Which NATO policy, to allow countries to join of their own free will?
Do you prefer the russian form of expansion and subjugation
My biggest problem with this kinda stuff is with Anubis and like one site using cloudflare.
With my current setup, like what feels like 99% of alternative r€ddit alternate frontend hosted sites don’t let me in. So I am stuck using my redirect extension to keep trying to connect to a different instance from the list and it usually takes a while.
And then, as someone who like emulation, I gotta give a huge screw you to how ghe emulation gametech wiki thing completely blocks me from connecting to their site with a VPN active. Like, I just wanna see what’s new in the emulator realm in terms of whether or not they still suggest certain emulators and their cloudflare settings basically shit on me for wanting to provately browse their website. Fuck me for not wanting my ISP looking at everything I do!
They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.
I’m even more annoyed by anubis. Letting me wait in the browser for an enternity for some check that a bot with a native implementation can solve in milliseconds.
Proof of work my ass.
Tbh I never had to wait much with anubis, neither with my phone or computer; websites that make me wait a lot (like the arch wiki IIRC) then give ya access without having to do the check again;
Also, Anubis unlike Cloudflare does not block me just cuz i have NoScript installedIt sure can, instead of doing 50 requests. A slowdown is all that’s needed to make random scraping uneconomical.
I’ve just considered it a casualty of the privacy wars.
I don’t know if they’re deployed as a “weapon of annoyance” or anything, but I do notice that when I’m using a) a degoogled browser, b) an ad-blocking dns, c) mask my location, and/or d) block my IP. Suddenly (almost) every website makes me wait by throwing that at me.
I think it’s lowkey trying to annoy me to the point where I give up on having those privacy measures, but they underestimate my hatred of corporate fuckery.
I’d guess your client just looks more like a crawler that way and gets a JS challenge thrown its way
Bots are genuinely a problem.
Nah, fuck them bots.
I’m going to go ballistic if I have to pick out all the pictures of fucking crosswalks one more time.
“you are now a bus. click on pictures of things you’re about to run over”
You’re labeling data for Google… for free. It’s not about ‘stopping’ bots, but about swindling free labour from the working-class.
Other systems for deterring bots don’t force you to menially label data for a for-profit corporation worth billions/trillions. An example of one that is automatic and open-source is anubis.
I know. And that pisses me off even more.
Seems like a complaint a bot would have.
Fuck, so now anyone who’s different is a bot or AI? Seriously, if I were a robot, why would I write a post complaining about websites? If I were AI, I’d have better things to do.
That’s exactly what an AI would say to try to look like a person.
Dude, you’re watching too many science fiction movies. Even though artificial intelligence might be quite advanced these days, if I were a robot I wouldn’t waste my time talking to humans. I’d think of something worse: ending the lives of these poor, brainless mortals. You’re crazy, man :-P
They are just messing with you
That’s exactly what a robot would say to look like a human.
Fuck you 😾
Cloudflare tracks TF outta you. Not antibot checkoff, but Cloudflare def
Oh, so basically websites might be seeing my data for Google or worse. It didn’t seem like a good thing anyway, but this verified bot always seems to analyze your behavior and the things you do.
Man, if the checks feel excessive you’d be astounded to know how the bot frequency feels 😂
Yes, it is getting annoying. I do not have any anti-automation measurements on my services (besides robots.txt, if that counts), I just let everyone pass, no matter if human, script or AI. The only thing that annoys me sometimes is when searching through logs because of the frequeny of requests, but as long as it doesn’t get to a level where it impacts performance I really don’t care that much about it.
