Small update as I'm now tired and going off to sleep.
I have finally implemented go-away on our main site and it hasn't broken (fingers crossed) any of our frontends!
I have added the non-js challenge which is called a meta-refresh challenge. This means those of you who view sites without javascript will also be able to continue using reddthat without troubles, but the bots are already failing!
We currently have sent the HTTP 418 (I'm a tea pot) Response code over 1900 times since implementing goaway (within the last 5 minutes)
I'll be looking to add a JS challenge in the coming weeks if the bots start implementing proper browsers.
FYI. If you are affected by this, and cannot seem to complete the challenge, you can get around this by using our Voyager frontend to let me know, or any Lemmy application. As both of those directly interface with the API endpoints.
Cheers,
Tiff
Edit. In the past 12 hours we have had the following total queries by http code:
Count HTTP Code
4654 200 <- people who "completed" the "challenge"
406 206
122 301
8 302
243 307
204 400
3 403
479 404
34946 418 <- very bad bots
1 499
186 500
1617 502 <- meta, openAI, bytedance, etc
4 503
2 504