Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically

I cut bot traffic to my site by over 80% with a simple trap. Last month, my hobby website OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data to visitors. As much as I'd like to think the site is enormously popular, it looks like it is just AI bots endlessly crawling the data and slurping up the images. So I've built B6 to be an indiscriminate tool to eradicate these unwanted parasites. It is very loosely inspired by Jeff Starr's Blackhole, but works even on sites with heavy caching. Here's the high level description of how it works. Create a directory like /honeypot/ on your site Put some code in index.php within the directory Add the honeypot as an explicit "Disallow" in robots.txt Include a hidden link to to the honeypot on every page of your site If something accesses that page, write its IP address to your .htaccess The .htaccess bans the IP address from ever accessing your site again. This blog post shows you how you can build this yourself and discusses some of the problems it…

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