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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?

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[-] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

It just means you're difficult to track and fingerprint. So good job 👍

[-] sudoer777@lemmy.ml 7 points 7 hours ago

The anti-bot checks are awful for usability, and the bots that keep spamming everything are even worse

[-] RhondaSandTits@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 8 hours ago

Cloudflare can fuck right off!

Use anubis

[-] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 9 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I dunno, Anubis never gave me too much trouble, meanwhile that fucking "Gandalf" thing they have on some Nitter/Redlib instances keeps getting stuck on my device, and if you reload the page you get insta blocked 🫠

[-] swelter_spark@reddthat.com 4 points 10 hours ago

They've made a large chunk of the internet inaccesible to me.

[-] smeenz 4 points 8 hours ago
[-] TransNeko@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago

Beep Bop Boop.

[-] LeftReddit2@lemmy.world 29 points 19 hours ago

These days? Fuck no. I think it's like 57% of all web traffic these days is just bots. This is absolutely needed.

[-] twistabledeer@lemmy.world 12 points 18 hours ago

Cloudflare is getting rich from all of these bots. We had turn to Cloudflare at work because bots were scraping our website and essentially DDoSing. Cloudflare worked perfectly and rate limiting bot scraping.

[-] eah@programming.dev 2 points 11 hours ago

You can add "Strengthened Cloudflare as the Internet's single point of failure" to the long, growing list of awful things which have happened due to this AI boom.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

I run a reticulum NomadNet site. I setup logging, since there are no 'sessions' and I don't want to force everyone to identify, I just calcuate bot traffic based on time, order and frequency of loads, bots's scraping are likely 80% of my traffic. And this is for a service that's designed to support 200bps radio links.

[-] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Not as excessive as all the crap that can happen after a data breach.

[-] mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 7 hours ago

or a car crash...

[-] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

That depends. How well do they work?

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

It's proportional to the amount of rude AI crawling, from what I've heard.

The industry has put every reasonably accessible piece of human writing in their datasets, by now, and are scrounging for the remaining little bits. Old, obscure, obsolete paper books nobody ever reads are apparently a hot item. So, yeah, your latest blog post is probably worth some fraction of a penny, and that's all it takes.

[-] WormFood@lemmy.world 51 points 23 hours ago

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

[-] YeahToast@aussie.zone 2 points 4 hours ago

Wanna make that 9?

[-] smeenz 1 points 8 hours ago

The internet is for bots

[-] earlier_riser@lemmy.world 13 points 20 hours ago

I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don't think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.

This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.

CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.

It is what it is I suppose.

[-] 0x0@infosec.pub 18 points 22 hours ago

Im ok with them as long as theyre not demanding input by clicking everything that is a fire post so they can train their ai for free

[-] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 points 18 hours ago

I wish they could do it transparently but no, they're not excessive. There's too many bots on the Internet and it's fucking things up.

[-] UpperBroccoli@feddit.org 8 points 20 hours ago

It is that or shutting down your site.

Those fucking bots just keep coming, causing traffic no small or medium site can cope with. So yeah, deal with it.

[-] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 18 hours ago

I can't think of a site that doesn't use these anymore.

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 14 points 1 day ago

Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA

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[-] bold_omi@lemmy.today 5 points 19 hours ago

Captchas suck. Don't trust reCaptcha, and avoid Cloudflare captchas.

That said, Techaro's Anubis is a good thing.

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[-] BenjiRenji@feddit.org 8 points 22 hours ago

Since I use a VPN they are everywhere. Small price to pay.

[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 8 points 22 hours ago

My Lemmy bot-check comes with a picture of a sexy cat girl. It's brief, but it's there.

[-] bold_omi@lemmy.today 4 points 19 hours ago

That's Techaro's Anubis. It inconveniences crawlers notably without demanding input from the user.

[-] Stolas@lemmy.ca 7 points 22 hours ago

They're frustrating mostly because they're likely not working.

Oh sure, they're preventing a lot of low effort bots and scrapping but so many more get through.

[-] kepix@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

should the sites just give up cause of you extra 3 second time? also do yourself a favour and use a client.

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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2026
304 points (91.3% liked)

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