SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers. We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of mitigations which are keeping the problem contained for now. However, some of our mitigations may impact end-users.
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We use NGINX’s 444 on every LLM crawler we see.
Caddy has a similar “close connection” option called “abort” as part of the static response.
HAProxy has the “silent-drop” option which also closes the TCP connection silently.
I’ve found crawling attempts end more quickly using this option - especially attacks - but my sample size is relatively small.
Edit: we do this because too often we’ve seen them ignore robots.txt. They believe all data is theirs. I do not.
I had the same issue. OpenAI was just slamming my tiny little server, ignoring the robots.txt. I had to install a LLM black hole and put a very basic password protection around my git server frontend, since it kept getting slammed by the crawler.
As much as I dont like google, I did see them come in, look at the robot.txt and no other calls for a week. Thats how it should work.
I wonder how much of the load problems I observe with lemmy.world are due to AI crawlers.
The companies that run these residential proxy networks are sketchy as shit and in a better world would be criminally prosecuted. They’re tricking random low-information users into installing VPNs and other software with backdoors that turn them into a veritable botnet.
