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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[–] 19 points 4 days ago (4 children)

I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.

Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze's owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.

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