this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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I'm using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I'm using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?

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[โ€“] mesamunefire@piefed.social 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have something similar with fail2ban + hidden buttons. If the requester goes and clicks on the hidden buttons on the main site, it gets into a rabbit hole. After 3 requests, it gets banned for a bit. Usually stops the worst offenders. OpenAI and some of the scrapers are the worst.

Google/bing, I do actually see them hit robots.txt then jump off, which is what they should be going.

[โ€“] ptz@dubvee.org 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Oooooh. That's smart. I mostly host apps, but in theory, I should be able to dynamically modify the response body and tack on some HTML for a hidden button and do that.

I used to disallow everything in robots.txt but the worst crawlers just ignored it. Now my robots.txt says all are welcome and every bot gets shunted to the tarpit ๐Ÿ˜ˆ

[โ€“] mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Nice! Thats another way to do it. ๐Ÿ˜€

I know others use Arabis(?) I think thats what it called. The anime girl one that does a calc on top. Ive never had good luck with it. I think bot are using something to get around and it messes with my requests. Might also be my own fiddling.

[โ€“] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I know others use Arabis(?) I think thats what it called.

You probably mean Anubis.