I’m getting really tired of “verify you’re not a bot” checks everywhere.
I understand these checks help prevent bots, but they seem to appear on so many websites now. Does anyone else find them frustrating?
I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.
This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.
CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.
It is what it is I suppose.
Seems like a big switch in the last 3-6 months? Even google is making me do stupid captcha when I occasionally use it.
In the last 24 hours my small personal website got 8 legitimate visitors and 74,000 requests from bots, most of which were either malicious or aggressive ai crawlers
They’re frustrating mostly because they’re likely not working.
Oh sure, they’re preventing a lot of low effort bots and scrapping but so many more get through.
My Lemmy bot-check comes with a picture of a sexy cat girl. It’s brief, but it’s there.
Unless you want this place to wind up like youtube and reddit with zionist AI bots skewing the entire website in favor of israel, no.
I run a site that only advertises itself in one country and is of no interest to anyone else. Cloudflare’s threat monitor lists the three countries that it’s blocked the most attacks from are:
- USA
- South Africa
- Israel
…and I’m supposed to be scared of the Chinese?
The pegasus project and PrivateInternetAccess (a vpn service owned by the mossad) are old news. Citizen lab is a new internet research firm in israel that does “zero-click” malware attacks (as in just visiting the page gets you infected):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/israeli-ad-tech-firm-helped-spy-on-al-jazeera-devices
That shit is already here though, I dont know what the fix is but there are a lot more argumentative tankies and the like now.
They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.
I’m even more annoyed by anubis. Letting me wait in the browser for an enternity for some check that a bot with a native implementation can solve in milliseconds.
Proof of work my ass.
I’ve just considered it a casualty of the privacy wars.
I don’t know if they’re deployed as a “weapon of annoyance” or anything, but I do notice that when I’m using a) a degoogled browser, b) an ad-blocking dns, c) mask my location, and/or d) block my IP. Suddenly (almost) every website makes me wait by throwing that at me.
I think it’s lowkey trying to annoy me to the point where I give up on having those privacy measures, but they underestimate my hatred of corporate fuckery.
I’d guess your client just looks more like a crawler that way and gets a JS challenge thrown its way
Nah, fuck them bots.
I’m going to go ballistic if I have to pick out all the pictures of fucking crosswalks one more time.
“you are now a bus. click on pictures of things you’re about to run over”
Seems like a complaint a bot would have.
Fuck, so now anyone who’s different is a bot or AI? Seriously, if I were a robot, why would I write a post complaining about websites? If I were AI, I’d have better things to do.
No, but only because I’ve helped run a website recently and you underestimate just how much wasted traffic is from scrapper bots. On our limited bandwidth, it was practically a DDOS attack all the time.
You may not understand just how prevalent bot traffic is. I self-host a small personal website that real people only actually visit once in a blue moon, but I get constant attempts to access the Wordpress admin console (my website isn’t made with Wordpress lol)
Anything fighting bots is fine with me, even if it inconveniences me for a few more seconds
Yes, and the ones that put part of a bicycle into the next square, so it’s not full of bicycle. Are bots supposed to pick or not, it should be more clear if we’re supposed to pick squares with any pixel of a bike. Perhaps give parameters what percentage of the square’s pixels should contain bike to count as bike.
