I’m getting really tired of “verify you’re not a bot” checks everywhere.
I understand these checks help prevent bots, but they seem to appear on so many websites now. Does anyone else find them frustrating?
Using a VPN? They trigger like whoA
My biggest problem with this kinda stuff is with Anubis and like one site using cloudflare.
With my current setup, like what feels like 99% of alternative r€ddit alternate frontend hosted sites don’t let me in. So I am stuck using my redirect extension to keep trying to connect to a different instance from the list and it usually takes a while.
And then, as someone who like emulation, I gotta give a huge screw you to how ghe emulation gametech wiki thing completely blocks me from connecting to their site with a VPN active. Like, I just wanna see what’s new in the emulator realm in terms of whether or not they still suggest certain emulators and their cloudflare settings basically shit on me for wanting to provately browse their website. Fuck me for not wanting my ISP looking at everything I do!
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.
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.
Considering that some Moderators in major lemmy.world forums and possibly even an Admin or two are rabid Zionists (the registration e-mail for my user in lemmy.world was literally leaked to Israel and I started getting invitations to “get to know Israel” online events on it, so clearly some Zionist had access to their user database), I think that specifically lemmy.world’s anti-bot checks aren’t really to stop “Zionist AI bots” unless the very real, very human Zionists in positions of control over the forums and server there think the “human touch” is too important in pro-Israel and pro-Genocide propaganda to have automated Zionist bots around.
That shit is already here though, I dont know what the fix is but there are a lot more argumentative tankies and the like now.
Lemmy was created by .ml with assistance hardening the platform from Hexbear. There is no “now”, Lemmy has always been communist, you’re just a stupid lib who assumes yourself the default.
I don’t equate fans of russian aggression to communism.
I run a site that only advertises itself in one country and is of no interest to anyone else. Cloudflare’s threat monitor lists the three countries that it’s blocked the most attacks from are:
- USA
- South Africa
- Israel
…and I’m supposed to be scared of the Chinese?
Look over there.
Over there!
Those are the Bad Guys TM
Don’t look over here.
Only Good Guys TM over here.
No need to check. Trust us, we’re the Good Guys TM
Didn’t you get the memo that the Chinese and Russians are the enemy while USA and Israel are the good guys?
Pedo Trump and holocaust netanyahu are our idols in the west, apparently.
The pegasus project and PrivateInternetAccess (a vpn service owned by the mossad) are old news. Citizen lab is a new internet research firm in israel that does “zero-click” malware attacks (as in just visiting the page gets you infected):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/israeli-ad-tech-firm-helped-spy-on-al-jazeera-devices
They should just use Anubis. At least we then see cute anime characters while the bot check runs.
I’m even more annoyed by anubis. Letting me wait in the browser for an enternity for some check that a bot with a native implementation can solve in milliseconds.
Proof of work my ass.
It sure can, instead of doing 50 requests. A slowdown is all that’s needed to make random scraping uneconomical.
Bots are genuinely a problem.
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.
I’d guess your client just looks more like a crawler that way and gets a JS challenge thrown its way
Yes, it is getting annoying. I do not have any anti-automation measurements on my services (besides robots.txt, if that counts), I just let everyone pass, no matter if human, script or AI. The only thing that annoys me sometimes is when searching through logs because of the frequeny of requests, but as long as it doesn’t get to a level where it impacts performance I really don’t care that much about it.
Nah, fuck them bots.
I’m going to go ballistic if I have to pick out all the pictures of fucking crosswalks one more time.
“you are now a bus. click on pictures of things you’re about to run over”
You’re labeling data for Google… for free. It’s not about ‘stopping’ bots, but about swindling free labour from the working-class.
Other systems for deterring bots don’t force you to menially label data for a for-profit corporation worth billions/trillions. An example of one that is automatic and open-source is anubis.
Maybe just because I started out waiting like 15 seconds for a handshake when connecting to the internet, but it doesn’t bother me a bit if it helps against bots.
Cloudflare tracks TF outta you. Not antibot checkoff, but Cloudflare def
Oh, so basically websites might be seeing my data for Google or worse. It didn’t seem like a good thing anyway, but this verified bot always seems to analyze your behavior and the things you do.
Papers please
Yes, and the ones that put part of a bicycle into the next square, so it’s not full of bicycle. Are bots supposed to pick or not, it should be more clear if we’re supposed to pick squares with any pixel of a bike. Perhaps give parameters what percentage of the square’s pixels should contain bike to count as bike.
I’m fucking right there with you. Sometimes I wonder if I am a bot because I fucking fail those things most of the time when that happens.
I pick every square that has even a sliver of a bike. But not the rider.
I prefer this to the string of sites that just outright block me based on location. Or have permanently banned my IP range without me ever visiting them.
