this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024

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Blocking AI crawlers with Caddy (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was reading the reddit thread on Claude AI crawlers effectively DDOSing Linux Mint forums https://libreddit.lunar.icu/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/

and I wanted to block all ai crawlers from my selfhosted stuff.

I don't trust crawlers to respect the Robots.txt but you can get one here: https://darkvisitors.com/

Since I use Caddy as a Server, I generated a directive that blocks them based on their useragent. The content of the regex basically comes from darkvisitors.

Sidenote - there is a module for blocking crawlers as well, but it seemed overkill for me https://github.com/Xumeiquer/nobots

For anybody who is interested, here is the block_ai_crawlers.conf I wrote.

(blockAiCrawlers) {
  @blockAiCrawlers {
    header_regexp User-Agent "(?i)(Bytespider|CCBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|Google-Extended|GPTBot|omgili|anthropic-ai|Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|cohere-ai)"
  }
  handle @blockAiCrawlers {
    abort
  }
}

# Usage:
# 1. Place this file next to your Caddyfile
# 2. Edit your Caddyfile as in the example below
#
# ```
# import block_ai_crawlers.conf
#
# www.mywebsite.com {
#   import blockAiCrawlers
#   reverse_proxy * localhost:3000
# }
# ```

top 11 comments

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 6 months ago (5 children)

I got meaner with them :3c

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

I just want you to know that was an amazing read, was actually thinking "It gets worse? Oh it does. Oh, IT GETS EVEN WORSE?"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

The nobots module I've linked bombs them

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

This is one of the best things I've ever read.

I'd love to see a robots.txt do a couple safe listings, then a zip bomb, then a safe listing. It would be fun to see how many log entries from an IP look like get a, get b, get zip bomb.... no more requests.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Suggestion at the end:

  <a class="boom" href="https://boom .arielaw.ar">hehe</a>

Wouldn't it destroy GoogleBot (and other search engine) those making your site delisted from Search?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

In dark mode, the anchor tags are difficult to read. They're dark blue on a dark background. Perhaps consider something with a much higher contrast?

A picture of a website with a dark purple background and dark blue links.

Apart from that, nice idea - I'm going to deploy the zipbomb today!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm a fan of hellpotting them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Ooh, didn't know about that one... thanks

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

We should do more than block them, they need to be teergrubed.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Thats an easy modification. Just redirect or reverse proxy to the tarpit instead of abort .

I was even thinking about an infinitely linked data-poisoned html document, but there seemed to be no ready made project that can generate one at the moment. (No published data-poisoning techniques for plain text at all afaik. But there is one for images.)

Ultimately I decided to just abort the connection as I don't want my servers to waste traffic or CPU cycles.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Such a cool person making the video available for download