I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…
It’s already hard enough for self-hosters and small online communities to deal with spam from fleshbags, now we’re being swarmed by clankers. I have a little Mediawiki to document my
deranged maladaptive daydreamsworldbuilding and conlanging projects, and the only traffic besides me is likely AI crawlers.I hate this so much. It’s not enough that huge centralized platforms have the network effect on their side, they have to drown our quiet little corners of the web under a whelming flood of soulless automata.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation nginx Popular HTTP server
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #90 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 17:41] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There’s usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.
If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.
Reference for lazy ones: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
that’s the kind of shit we pollute our air and water for…and properly seal and drive home the fuckedness of our future and planet.
i totally get you sending them to nepenthes though.
Y’all need to learn to cache things, shiit
This is not how things work on the modern web. Did you just wake up from a 20 year coma?
Whenever you’re browsing even a semi popular website these days there’s probably a 98% chance you’re hitting a cloudflare cached version of it. Have you been asleep the last 10 years?
For static sites, yes. To actually protect dynamic sites against AI crawlers, Cloudflare has to do much more than just caching.
And besides that, Cloudflare is a huge single point of failure and highly privacy invasive.
Dynamic sites still get cached.
Cloudflare definitely is a huge single point of failure, and it is a huge problem imo - but what can we do? Their product is so widely used because of how comprehensive, good, and necessary it is.
