This comic follows on from the Previous comic which will almost certainly provide context.
You might not wanna be famous, but when you’re level 10, every organization within a mile is watching what you’re doing.
most of these AI scrapers don’t respect robots.txt, so I’m not sure that really helps much, but… we have tried doing all of these things.
Someone on lemmy suggested to create a dummy endpoint that normal people won’t be able to navigate to, and disallow it in robots.txt
Then when somebody crawls it you know they are ignoring robots.txt, and you ip ban them
That’s pretty clever.
I think that these AI scrapers might be smart enough that this doesn’t really work though - at least if I were designing them I’d have them all come from dynamic IPs and not have any of them bother hitting the same target more than once. These things are very dedicated to acquiring content without consent, and if they’re capable of causing problems for (say) Reddit, I’m not sure my little website is going to have much luck deterring them.
Honestly a better strategy might be to just glaze everything I draw.
I am not sure if it costs money, but you could implement captchas.
Or use cloudflare to do that bot detecting for you.
Worst case you make it so you need to create an account to see content.
Instead of a tech solution, why not a legal one? Place somewhere in the website that refusal to follow your robots.txt is agreement to pay you x amount of money for your content. Then combine that with the dummy page solution the other person brought up so you can record the IP address, then take them to court so they pay you. Has potential to bring you a really really nice chunk of money.
