I was scouring the indie-web earlier, and found a pretty useful list of bots to add to your robots.txt. But, since I’m not convinced that this is enough to keep them away, I also figured out a simple way to at least potentially completely block them from accessing your websites.

  • UltraHamster64
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    36 days ago

    Hmm, how would one attempt to actually do this in practice?

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
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      6 days ago

      Eventually I’m gonna make a proper article about it, but what I’m doing right now boils down to this:

      • Intercept 404
      • Redirect to error-hole.php
      • error-hole.php returns 200 and spits out a bunch of bot-targets

      The next iteration of this will include a lot of uncompressed filler data so hopefully the bots have to download half a gigabyte of data every time they do this. I’m not paying for bandwidth, it doesn’t matter to me.

      See for yourself https://drkt.eu/fdhasklfh

      I can see that it works by just looking at my access logs.