No, but only because I've helped run a website recently and you underestimate just how much wasted traffic is from scrapper bots. On our limited bandwidth, it was practically a DDOS attack all the time.

You may not understand just how prevalent bot traffic is. I self-host a small personal website that real people only actually visit once in a blue moon, but I get constant attempts to access the Wordpress admin console (my website isn’t made with Wordpress lol)

In the last 24 hours my small personal website got 8 legitimate visitors and 74,000 requests from bots, most of which were either malicious or aggressive ai crawlers

I don't like it, but I will say that it beats that period where I was forced to constantly do captchas

I've just considered it a casualty of the privacy wars.

I don't know if they're deployed as a "weapon of annoyance" or anything, but I do notice that when I'm using a) a degoogled browser, b) an ad-blocking dns, c) mask my location, and/or d) block my IP. Suddenly (almost) every website makes me wait by throwing that at me.

I think it's lowkey trying to annoy me to the point where I give up on having those privacy measures, but they underestimate my hatred of corporate fuckery.

Yes, but I feel good knowing there's an AI bot owner out there more frustrated than I am.

These days? Fuck no. I think it's like 57% of all web traffic these days is just bots. This is absolutely needed.

A lot of the comments seem to be focused on AI bots or scraping.

These are intended to protect against super high volumes of requests that drain resources. Like others have mentioned, it may be related to a VPN. The system is detecting a lot of requests from a single IP. If you are on a VPN or using another tool to spoof your IP you might be coming from the same IP as other people who are accessing it at the same time or have recently tried to access it. Website and other services usualy have bandwidth caps so they can only serve so many responses at once, and if are all being taken up by bots, the website or other service won't work for legit users. This is how a DDoS attack works. Eta: so these checks are less about stopping bots from accessing the site than stopping bots from making the site inaccessible to legit users.

(This is a very simplified explanation because that's my level of understanding, I hope if there are errors someone will jump in and correct.)

Do I find it annoying? Yes. But I understand the site might not work without them.

Man, if the checks feel excessive you'd be astounded to know how the bot frequency feels 😂

As others have said, they are absolutely necessary in this day and age.

But also the bots are not deliberately targetting lemmy, it's just that lemmy has unlimited pages to scrape and so the traffic piles up. If your issue is specifically with Lemmy then using an app should help. Many instances also give logged in users a free pass.

It's proportional to the amount of rude AI crawling, from what I've heard.

The industry has put every reasonably accessible piece of human writing in their datasets, by now, and are scrounging for the remaining little bits. Old, obscure, obsolete paper books nobody ever reads are apparently a hot item. So, yeah, your latest blog post is probably worth some fraction of a penny, and that's all it takes.

{cries in screenreader} try not being able to solve any of the checks. Half of the modern web is now just blocked off for blind folks.

Im ok with them as long as theyre not demanding input by clicking everything that is a fire post so they can train their ai for free

I'm going to go ballistic if I have to pick out all the pictures of fucking crosswalks one more time.

Cloudflare tracks TF outta you. Not antibot checkoff, but Cloudflare def

They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.

I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don't think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.

This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.

CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.

It is what it is I suppose.

I’m frustrated by how Lemmy.world treats VPN traffic, too, even if I sympathize with the underlying challenge they face. How do we fix it?

Nah, fuck them bots.

yes, including useless captchas.. even more so as i know they're trivially bypassed/workarounded on sophisticated bots

i understand it does block stupid crawlers but still.

As long as I don't have to solve captchas, I don't mind.

Needing to select multiple rounds of crosswalks or busses makes me close the page.

Bots are genuinely a problem.

The anti-bot checks are awful for usability, and the bots that keep spamming everything are even worse

I dunno, Anubis never gave me too much trouble, meanwhile that fucking "Gandalf" thing they have on some Nitter/Redlib instances keeps getting stuck on my device, and if you reload the page you get insta blocked 🫠

I don't mind them so much, as a concept. But why does Cloudflare, for example, need to verify my humanity on every website? Verify I'm a human once, save the cookie, then i should be marked as human for a period (30 days for example) before being verified against (unless some sus things happen). Why every damn time on every damn page?

Side note, I love the little catgirl one lol she's so cute

Unless you want this place to wind up like youtube and reddit with zionist AI bots skewing the entire website in favor of israel, no.

I mean I get it. It's frustrating to deal with, but if the alternative is that Lemmy is completely hammered by bot traffic I'll take the brief inconvenience.