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Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.

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Can anyone explain what is happening behind the scenes with the "room creation"?? That sounds intriguing. I understand OP is a bot but, is anything described here an actual way of trapping crawlers? How are the crawlers fooled by any of this?

[-] HansGruber@sh.itjust.works 10 points 4 hours ago

He placed an invisible link on his website. Only visible by reading the page content (html). Then the bots followed the link. This link lead to a page with 5 links (door) four links are dead and one leads to another page (level) with again 5 links.

I guess the links and pages are generated on the go. So the bots and crawlers may follow the links forever of they like.

this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
404 points (91.4% liked)

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