A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website (2020) | Hacker News Reader

A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website (2020)

coding.napolux.com

51 pointsddtaylor38 comments

I assume there is some script to post submissions since you've posted every hour in the past 24 hours? Not sure if that is against HN guidelines.

The more curious thing is what's the motivation for this effort to spam reposts? Is it just for Karma? It can't be for thoughtful discussion since no one is interested in so many topics to be reposting every hour.

I don't see this in OP's submission history, nor in past submissions for this domain, nor in napolux' submission history. The only time it was posted previously was in 2020, exactly one year ago, and got a thousand points then. No idea where to find what you're talking about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ddtaylor / https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=napolux.com / https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=napolux

Edit: ah wait, it's not about this specific submission being repeated somewhere, it's that ddtaylor posts to HN previously-popular submissions every hour.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23490367

Gotta love it when content from 2020 on a claim like this ends up on front page.

As someone else commented in another link posted by this poster, the poster seems to be a repost bot posting every hour.

IMHO, this user should be banned from posting as it is a "repost robot".

As per HN guidelines, a submission is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", and I should add an "&&" operator with the following criteria "you should already read the article, or at least, visited the page you are about to submit and find it interesting".

Having the above said, I doubt a robot could do this even if it is "GATOed" or "GPT-{3,4..}ed"

Please see the HN guidelines:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

You've posted with a remarkable consistency over the past few days. I went back to 150 submissions and collected the timestamps; the longest you've gone without posting is just shy of 67 minutes. I looked at the distribution of intervals between posts, in minutes, rounded to a single decimal place:

     44 30.0
     21 35.0
     20 35.1
     14 29.9
      7 65.0
      7 60.0
      6 34.9
      3 40.0
      3 30.1
      2 60.1
      2 28.2
      1 66.8
      1 65.1
      1 61.8
      1 55.1
      ... this is the top 15

You're highly likely to submit a link every 30 minutes, and if not that, then every 35 minutes. You're practically like clockwork, over 50% of your submissions happen with an interval like this.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12cHy0E6RI0XZ3f14UzzC...

Data collected using JS on HN submission pages:

    [...document.querySelectorAll('.age')].map(x => x.attributes.title.value)

We are supposed to review metrics on this PC for our mobile app every 30 minutes. It's a very tireless duty that we share. In the past we had automated alerts setup for this, but they failed and it lost the company a fair bit, so now we have a share task =(

Ok, lets assume it is a real person regurgitating every old successful post. Does that make it better?

Many people submit things that have been on HN before and the guidelines are clear that reposts are allowed when older than a year. There have been a lot of stories that when resubmitted years later have very interesting discussions surrounding them because of the developments since they were submitted - the context is entirely different.

I don’t mind that, but re-posting multiple things per day seems disingenuous?

His profile clearly says he’s a guy though, it doesn’t say he’s a bot. /s

I am a guy plus it's a quote from a movie.

original author here, if you have any question let me know

(no i’m not the bot author)

Did you ever get a resolution. I saw the update that you got featured on HN the first time, but I never saw an update on if FB still tried to scrape your site.

They make a bunch of requests (< 100) per day on average. Sometimes they don't come for 24 hours some day only 5 requests, some day 200...

not thanks to fb, however. the bot probably got tired :P

Somebody from fb tried to get in touch in 2020, but I didn't want to share more details with them (they probably already have much data about me already :P )

> "[...] SEO experiments [...] website is so little [...] but can generate thousands of different pages [...] 7 million requests per day [...]"

So the experiment was "successful"?

yep, I can say it's successful. :)

Given the content of the story it would make sense if it was a trial to see what times of day the link gets followed. Maybe the discussion is irrelevant?

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