Ask HN: Why do you need Anti-Bot? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do you need Anti-Bot?

2 pointsandjidnddi5 comments

Aside from credential stuffing (banks, etc), why do you care about anti-bot? Why do people throw money in software to prevent bots?

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Mostly you may need it for:

1. Preventing SPAM (spammy comments, articles, votes etc.)

2. Preventing email collection (obfuscating could be an option: https://freetools.dev/email-encoder)

3. Clean up server logs (bots creates a lot of lines in server log files)

4. Clean up your Analytics (lot of bots may count as real visitors)

5. Security concerns (not only banks have important data)

6. Avoid automatic registrations (your users list counts too)

Mostly to avoid scraping. If I was trying to direct people to my website and make it stand out, why would I let others crib my data?

It's always a downhill battle, but the people who implement it know this. They don't care if you've found a new workaround, they've probably got 2 more mitigations ready for the moment you think you've pulled one over on them. The ultimate goal is to tire you out as a developer and make you give up. Judging by the amount of frustration I see online, it sounds like "they" are winning.

So it’s a “luxury” in the security world? This is what gets me thinking: I think anti-bot companies are really pushing their marketing for a bunch of things that are very superfluous to most people/businesses.

Like, it seems they’re trying really hard to make a case for anti-bot where it’s merely an extra

Meh, for a lot of business models it makes a lot of sense. I wholeheartedly disagree with the sentiment, but that doesn't change the fact that deflecting automation tools/scraping is the best way to keep people coming to your site. If you're showing ads or pushing unique/paywalled data, it's probably well worth it to ensure that you've got scraping prevention. Those people need every dollar they can get, and if their power-users can circumvent them entirely it's considered a threat to their practice.

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