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That's what honeypots are for. Deny /honeypot in your robots.txt Add <a href="/honeypot" style="display:none" aria-hidden="true">ban me</a> to your index.html
by zarzavat 1y ago
That's what honeypots are for.
Deny /honeypot in your robots.txt
Add <a href="/honeypot" style="display:none" aria-hidden="true">ban me</a> to your index.html
If an IP accesses that path, ban it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kwar13 1y agoI like this. Adding now. Thanks!
- jpc0 1y ago> <a href="/honeypot" style="display:none" aria-hidden="true">ban me</a> Unrelated meta question but is the aria tag necessarily since display: none; should be removing the content from the flow?
- zarzavat 1y agoI would hope that all screen readers would respect display:none. The aria-hidden is for CYA, banning even one blind user would be quite bad optics (as is this sentence now that I think about it).
- brewmarche 1y agoI wonder whether the path in the robots.txt (or maybe a <link> tag with a bogus rel attribute) would already be enough to make evil bots follow it. That would at least avoid accidental follows due to CSS/ARIA not properly working in weird constellations
- EPendragon 1y agoThere is an interesting article about AI tarpits that addresses a similar issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-... The argument is basically to have them scrape your website indefinitely wasting their resources for the bots that decide to ignore your robots.txt (or any bot if you desire)
- fpoling 1y agoWhile this may work today, the bots now more and more use if not the full headless rendering then at least apply CSS rules not to fetch invisible content.