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How to block AI Crawler Bots using robots.txt file
(www.cyberciti.biz)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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I disallow a page in my robots.txt and ip-ban everyone who goes there. Thats pretty effective.
Did you ban it in your humans.txt too?
humans typically don't visit [website]/fdfjsidfjsidojfi43j435345 when there's no button that links to it
I used to do this on one of my sites that was moderately popular in the 00's. I had a link hidden via javascript, so a user couldn't click it (unless they disabled javascript and clicked it), though it was hidden pretty well for that too.
IP hits would be put into a log and my script would add a /24 of that subnet into my firewall. I allowed specific IP ranges for some search engines.
Anyway, it caught a lot of bots. I really just wanted to stop automated attacks and spambots on the web front.
I also had a honeypot port that basically did the same thing. If you sent packets to it, your /24 was added to the firewall for a week or so. I think I just used netcat to add to yet another log and wrote a script to add those /24's to iptables.
I did it because I had so much bad noise on my logs and spambots, it was pretty crazy.
This thread has provided genius ideas I somehow never thought of, and I'm totally stealing them for my sites lol.
I LOVE VISITING FDFJSIDFJSIDOJFI435345 ON HUMAN WEBSITES, IT IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE HUMAN HOBBIES. ~~🤖~~👨
Can you explain this more?
Imagine posting a rule that says "do not walk on the grass" among other rules and then banning anyone who steps on the grass with the thought process that if they didn't obey that rule they were likely disobeying other rules. Except the grass is somewhere that no one would see unless they actually read the rules. The rules were the only place that mentioned that grass.
I like the Van Halen brown M&M version. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-halen-demand-concert-venues-remove-brown-mms-from-the-menu-180982570/
Is the page linked in the site anywhere, or just mentioned in the robots.txt file?
Only in the robots.txt
Excellent.
I think I might be able to create a fail2ban rule for that.
Not sure if that is effective at all. Why would a crawler check the robots.txt if it's programmed to ignore it anyways?
cause many crawlers seem to explicitly crawl "forbidden" sites
Google and script kiddies copying code...
You could also place the same page as a hidden link on your home page.
I doubt it'd be possible in most any way due to lack of server control, but I'm definitely gonna have to look this up to see if anything similar could be done on a neocities site.
smart
Can this be done without fail2ban?
probably. never used it tho
How did you do it? Looking to do this on my own site.
My websites Backend is written in flask so it was pretty easy to add
Should be able to do it with Crowdsec