Reporting spam

[Cholmondely]

Sometimes, when they're low on gas, you have to put a thumb over the top before you click the button. This is one reason why so many Jedi are deficient in the hand area.

Ummm - sounds more like a flamethrower than a light sabre...

[Cody]

Username: goats for sale?

[Disembodied]

Username: goats for sale?

Yeah … other alternative usernames under that IP address include

guns for sale
wood pallets for sale
French Bulldogs for sale

and - for those of us on a deadline -

goats for sale near me

[Cody]

I like goats - nice milk and cheese, tasty meat.

[Disembodied]

I like goats - nice milk and cheese, tasty meat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrtOFz5EVoE

[Cody]

Crikey, that takes me back! Mid-seventies, year of the heat wave! <wanders off, singing 96°in the shade>

[Cody]

Nothing to do with spam, plenty to do with bots!

A whole lot of ClaudeBot recently. I hate these scrapers, can we ban it? Haven't Cloudflare released a tool recently which nukes them?

[Cholmondely]

A brand new one!

Google Adsense [Bot]

"The AdSense crawler, called Mediapartners-Google, visits your site to determine its content in order to provide relevant ads."

[Wildeblood]

A brand new one!

Google Adsense [Bot]

Confirmed sighting, right now. Ban that stupid thing!

[Cholmondely]

I think that we should ban all bots!

MSN had a news item last night:

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

One fetcher bot seen smacking a website with 39,000 requests per minute

Cloud services giant Fastly has released a report claiming AI crawlers are putting a heavy load on the open web, slurping up sites at a rate that accounts for 80 percent of all AI bot traffic, with the remaining 20 percent used by AI fetchers. Bots and fetchers can hit websites hard, demanding data from a single site in thousands of requests per minute.…

According to the report [PDF], Facebook owner Meta's AI division accounts for more than half of those crawlers, while OpenAI accounts for the overwhelming majority of on-demand fetch requests.

"AI bots are reshaping how the internet is accessed and experienced, introducing new complexities for digital platforms," Fastly senior security researcher Arun Kumar opined in a statement on the report's release. "Whether scraping for training data or delivering real-time responses, these bots create new challenges for visibility, control, and cost. You can't secure what you can't see, and without clear verification standards, AI-driven automation risks are becoming a blind spot for digital teams."

The company's report is based on analysis of Fastly's Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (NGWAF) and Bot Management services, which the company says "protect over 130,000 applications and APIs and inspect more than 6.5 trillion requests per month" – giving it plenty of data to play with. The data reveals a growing problem: an increasing website load comes not from human visitors, but from automated crawlers and fetchers working on behalf of chatbot firms.

For more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-AA1KWu1C

The bots which are "members" can access even more information (Reidquat whisky bar, members details et cetera) and will thus waste even more time copying the data on our site. Banning them should cut the amount of time that they disrupt things for us.

References:
viewtopic.php?t=21933
viewtopic.php?t=21654

A brand new one!

Google Adsense [Bot]

Confirmed sighting, right now. Ban that stupid thing!