Bots are currently scraping the internet for LLM training data at unprecedented rates[1][2][3], driving up costs and destabilizing public-facing websites. I want to talk about how this has been particularly difficult for wikis, and has gotten much worse in the last few months.
The issue with wiki’s and source forges is that there is a maze of links to all past versions of everything, each generated on demand from a cpu-expensive database query. You basically have to limit the pages anonymous users can spider into. Forgejo has a setting to block expensive pages from non-logged in users for example.
Probably can configure anubis to require challenge that is proportional to the CPU time needed to render each page?
That seems to be a lot of peoples approach, but if they cared about time or bandwidth they wouldn’t be spidering Dow into your commit history multiple times a day. They have more patience and resources than your human readers.
I could see maybe caching that and providing it to a not-clearly-human user if it is in cache. That lets someone do something like link to a particular version of a file in a discussion here on the Threadiverse. The first user loading it will cause it to be cached.
Sure. Its just the thousands of obscure page edit history pages that ai crawlers hit every hour that cause the problem.