I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…
that’s the kind of shit we pollute our air and water for…and properly seal and drive home the fuckedness of our future and planet.
i totally get you sending them to nepenthes though.
Blocking them locally is one way, but if you’re already using cloudflare there’s a nice way to do it UPSTREAM so it’s not eating any of your resources.
You can do geofencing/blocking and bot-blocking via Cloudflare:
https://corelab.tech/cloudflarept2/It’s already hard enough for self-hosters and small online communities to deal with spam from fleshbags, now we’re being swarmed by clankers. I have a little Mediawiki to document my
deranged maladaptive daydreamsworldbuilding and conlanging projects, and the only traffic besides me is likely AI crawlers.I hate this so much. It’s not enough that huge centralized platforms have the network effect on their side, they have to drown our quiet little corners of the web under a whelming flood of soulless automata.
Anubis is supposed to filter out and block all those bots from accessing your webpage.
Iocaine, nepenthes, and/or madore’s book of infinity are intended to redirect them into a maze of randomly generated bullshit, which still consumes resources but is intended to poison the bots’ training data.
So pick your poison
Yeah I had the same thing. All of a sudden the load on my server was super high and I thought there was a huge issue. So I looked at the logs and saw an AI crawler absolutely slamming my server. I blocked it, so it only got 403 responses but it kept on slamming. So I blocked the IPs it was coming from in iptables, that helped a lot. My little server got about 10000 times the normal traffic.
I sorta get they want to index stuff, but why absolutely slam my server to death? Fucking assholes.
I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There’s usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.
If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.
Reference for lazy ones: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
Oh interesting! Ive done something similar but not didnt put as much effort.
For me, I just made an unending webpage that would create a link to another page…that would say bullshit. Then it would have another link with more bullshit…etc…etc…And it gets slower as time goes on.
Also made a fail2ban banning IPs that reached a certain number of links down. It worked really well, traffic is down 95% and it does not affect any real human users. Its great :)
I have a robots.txt that should tell them not to look at the sites. But if they dont want to read it, I dont want to be nice.
Bruh if you had a live stream of this I would subscribe to your only fans.
I… I don’t know how you’d even stream that? A log of pages loaded?
A log of pages loaded?
Keep going I’m almost there…
That sounds like iocaine and the book of infinity
How do you do that, I’m very interested! Also good to see you Admiral!
Thanks!
Mostly there’s three steps involved:
- Setup Nepenthes to receive the traffic
- Perform bot detection on inbound requests (I use a regex list and one is provided below)
- Configure traffic rules in your load balancer / reverse proxy to send the detected bot traffic to Nepenthes instead of the actual backend for the service(s) you run.
Here’s a rough guide I commented a while back: https://dubvee.org/comment/5198738
Here’s the post link at lemmy.world which should have that comment visible: https://lemmy.world/post/40374746
You’ll have to resolve my comment link on your instance since my instance is set to private now, but in case that doesn’t work, here’s the text of it:
So, I set this up recently and agree with all of your points about the actual integration being glossed over.
I already had bot detection setup in my Nginx config, so adding Nepenthes was just changing the behavior of that. Previously, I had just returned either 404 or 444 to those requests but now it redirects them to Nepenthes.
Rather than trying to do rewrites and pretend the Nepenthes content is under my app’s URL namespace, I just do a redirect which the bot crawlers tend to follow just fine.
There’s several parts to this to keep my config sane. Each of those are in include files.
-
An include file that looks at the user agent, compares it to a list of bot UA regexes, and sets a variable to either 0 or 1. By itself, that include file doesn’t do anything more than set that variable. This allows me to have it as a global config without having it apply to every virtual host.
-
An include file that performs the action if a variable is set to true. This has to be included in the
serverportion of each virtual host where I want the bot traffic to go to Nepenthes. If this isn’t included in a virtual host’sserverblock, then bot traffic is allowed. -
A virtual host where the Nepenthes content is presented. I run a subdomain (
content.mydomain.xyz). You could also do this as a path off of your protected domain, but this works for me and keeps my already complex config from getting any worse. Plus, it was easier to integrate into my existing bot config. Had I not already had that, I would have run it off of a path (and may go back and do that when I have time to mess with it again).
The
map-bot-user-agents.confis included in thehttpsection of Nginx and applies to all virtual hosts. You can either include this in the mainnginx.confor at the top (above theserversection) in your individual virtual host config file(s).The
deny-disallowed.confis included individually in each virtual hosts’sserversection. Even though the bot detection is global, if the virtual host’sserversection does not include the action file, then nothing is done.Files
map-bot-user-agents.conf
Note that I’m treating Google’s crawler the same as an AI bot because…well, it is. They’re abusing their search position by double-dipping on the crawler so you can’t opt out of being crawled for AI training without also preventing it from crawling you for search engine indexing. Depending on your needs, you may need to comment that out. I’ve also commented out the Python requests user agent. And forgive the mess at the bottom of the file. I inherited the seed list of user agents and haven’t cleaned up that massive regex one-liner.
# Map bot user agents ## Sets the $ua_disallowed variable to 0 or 1 depending on the user agent. Non-bot UAs are 0, bots are 1 map $http_user_agent $ua_disallowed { default 0; "~PerplexityBot" 1; "~PetalBot" 1; "~applebot" 1; "~compatible; zot" 1; "~Meta" 1; "~SurdotlyBot" 1; "~zgrab" 1; "~OAI-SearchBot" 1; "~Protopage" 1; "~Google-Test" 1; "~BacklinksExtendedBot" 1; "~microsoft-for-startups" 1; "~CCBot" 1; "~ClaudeBot" 1; "~VelenPublicWebCrawler" 1; "~WellKnownBot" 1; #"~python-requests" 1; "~bitdiscovery" 1; "~bingbot" 1; "~SemrushBot" 1; "~Bytespider" 1; "~AhrefsBot" 1; "~AwarioBot" 1; # "~Poduptime" 1; "~GPTBot" 1; "~DotBot" 1; "~ImagesiftBot" 1; "~Amazonbot" 1; "~GuzzleHttp" 1; "~DataForSeoBot" 1; "~StractBot" 1; "~Googlebot" 1; "~Barkrowler" 1; "~SeznamBot" 1; "~FriendlyCrawler" 1; "~facebookexternalhit" 1; "~*(?i)(80legs|360Spider|Aboundex|Abonti|Acunetix|^AIBOT|^Alexibot|Alligator|AllSubmitter|Apexoo|^asterias|^attach|^BackDoorBot|^BackStreet|^BackWeb|Badass|Bandit|Baid|Baiduspider|^BatchFTP|^Bigfoot|^Black.Hole|^BlackWidow|BlackWidow|^BlowFish|Blow|^BotALot|Buddy|^BuiltBotTough| ^Bullseye|^BunnySlippers|BBBike|^Cegbfeieh|^CheeseBot|^CherryPicker|^ChinaClaw|^Cogentbot|CPython|Collector|cognitiveseo|Copier|^CopyRightCheck|^cosmos|^Crescent|CSHttp|^Custo|^Demon|^Devil|^DISCo|^DIIbot|discobot|^DittoSpyder|Download.Demon|Download.Devil|Download.Wonder|^dragonfl y|^Drip|^eCatch|^EasyDL|^ebingbong|^EirGrabber|^EmailCollector|^EmailSiphon|^EmailWolf|^EroCrawler|^Exabot|^Express|Extractor|^EyeNetIE|FHscan|^FHscan|^flunky|^Foobot|^FrontPage|GalaxyBot|^gotit|Grabber|^GrabNet|^Grafula|^Harvest|^HEADMasterSEO|^hloader|^HMView|^HTTrack|httrack|HTT rack|htmlparser|^humanlinks|^IlseBot|Image.Stripper|Image.Sucker|imagefetch|^InfoNaviRobot|^InfoTekies|^Intelliseek|^InterGET|^Iria|^Jakarta|^JennyBot|^JetCar|JikeSpider|^JOC|^JustView|^Jyxobot|^Kenjin.Spider|^Keyword.Density|libwww|^larbin|LeechFTP|LeechGet|^LexiBot|^lftp|^libWeb| ^likse|^LinkextractorPro|^LinkScan|^LNSpiderguy|^LinkWalker|msnbot|MSIECrawler|MJ12bot|MegaIndex|^Magnet|^Mag-Net|^MarkWatch|Mass.Downloader|masscan|^Mata.Hari|^Memo|^MIIxpc|^NAMEPROTECT|^Navroad|^NearSite|^NetAnts|^Netcraft|^NetMechanic|^NetSpider|^NetZIP|^NextGenSearchBot|^NICErs PRO|^niki-bot|^NimbleCrawler|^Nimbostratus-Bot|^Ninja|^Nmap|nmap|^NPbot|Offline.Explorer|Offline.Navigator|OpenLinkProfiler|^Octopus|^Openfind|^OutfoxBot|Pixray|probethenet|proximic|^PageGrabber|^pavuk|^pcBrowser|^Pockey|^ProPowerBot|^ProWebWalker|^psbot|^Pump|python-requests\/|^Qu eryN.Metasearch|^RealDownload|Reaper|^Reaper|^Ripper|Ripper|Recorder|^ReGet|^RepoMonkey|^RMA|scanbot|SEOkicks-Robot|seoscanners|^Stripper|^Sucker|Siphon|Siteimprove|^SiteSnagger|SiteSucker|^SlySearch|^SmartDownload|^Snake|^Snapbot|^Snoopy|Sosospider|^sogou|spbot|^SpaceBison|^spanne r|^SpankBot|Spinn4r|^Sqworm|Sqworm|Stripper|Sucker|^SuperBot|SuperHTTP|^SuperHTTP|^Surfbot|^suzuran|^Szukacz|^tAkeOut|^Teleport|^Telesoft|^TurnitinBot|^The.Intraformant|^TheNomad|^TightTwatBot|^Titan|^True_Robot|^turingos|^TurnitinBot|^URLy.Warning|^Vacuum|^VCI|VidibleScraper|^Void EYE|^WebAuto|^WebBandit|^WebCopier|^WebEnhancer|^WebFetch|^Web.Image.Collector|^WebLeacher|^WebmasterWorldForumBot|WebPix|^WebReaper|^WebSauger|Website.eXtractor|^Webster|WebShag|^WebStripper|WebSucker|^WebWhacker|^WebZIP|Whack|Whacker|^Widow|Widow|WinHTTrack|^WISENutbot|WWWOFFLE|^ WWWOFFLE|^WWW-Collector-E|^Xaldon|^Xenu|^Zade|^Zeus|ZmEu|^Zyborg|SemrushBot|^WebFuck|^MJ12bot|^majestic12|^WallpapersHD)" 1; }deny-disallowed.conf
# Deny disallowed user agents if ($ua_disallowed) { # This redirects them to the Nepenthes domain. So far, pretty much all the bot crawlers have been happy to accept the redirect and crawl the tarpit continuously return 301 https://content.mydomain.xyz/; }Thank you! I’m going to start playing with this and see what I can figure out! I’ll be referencing this frequently!
Maybe I should flesh it out into an actual guide. The Nepenthes docs are “meh” at best and completely gloss over integrating it into your stack.
You’ll also need to give it corpus text to generate slop from. I used transcripts from 4 or 5 weird episodes of Voyager (let’s be honest: shit got weird on Voyager lol), mixed with some Jack Handy quotes and a few transcripts of Married…with Children episodes.
Vendetta 1800
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol nginx Popular HTTP server
2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #90 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 17:41] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]










