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’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?
ImHo yes. I may have no proof, but I believe, bot farmers have lots of super fast, weak bots, that will be filtered by that, but they probably also have some fancy, slowly working bots, that will pass the verification. So, content inside will be visible to the content farmer anyway.
Even worse? if we filter out weak content farms, who may not have strong bots, that means we help strong farms get even stronger, into monopoly - that may be even worse than letting everyone get it.
Or we could get some super protections? with fail positive checks? Maybe login only, with irl meeting account verification prior to any access? would be madness. Paid access to the group? madness and possibly against fedi idea)… how could we protect self, against stronger and stronger bots?
Even if it doesn’t prevent scraping entirely, filtering out the “fast, weak” bots help mitigate server load. Sufficiently many bots hitting your site is indistinguishable from a DDOS attack.