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Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis (weirdgloop.org)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 8 points 3 months ago (5 children)

The problem is that you can't block all scraping. The scrapers make their bots look like regular traffic, so even if you block all known scrapers, there will be tons that just look like humans visiting your site.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Collaborative list of basic IP blocks of known scraper hosts.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    They rent IPs, they can look like residential IPs.

    I don't know how these IP services work, but blocking them seems like blocking AWS - suddenly you didn't just block telegram but various websites and services don't work anymore.

    /edit: the article goes into this and also blocking

    Enter residential proxies, where anyone with a credit card can get all of their scraping requests “laundered” through a network of millions of IP addresses. The wikis get hit sometimes by scraper runs that cycle through a million IPs a day, and they >look like< they’re coming from legit places: mostly residential ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Charter, etc) where the customer probably doesn’t even know their IP is being used as an exit node for a residential proxy.

    There are companies out there selling realtime databases of residential proxy IPs, although it’s not clear to me how actionable that is when most residential proxies are also used by real people at the same time.

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