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Comment by nuccy | Hacker News Reader

Making js essential is not that hard, right? Just "display: none" on the root element, which is removed by js :)

More sophisticated options can been found in other comments.

Forcing all users of your website to use JavaScript to get around a scammer is pretty heavy-handed.

Presumably OP would only have to do this for a limited time, until the scammer gives up and moves on to an easier target. It's not the best, but I don't think it's as bad as you say.

Show me one website that today really works without javascript.

https://news.ycombinator.com

I've been surfing without javascript since 2015. Most websites continue to work fine without it (though some aesthetic breakage is pretty standard). About 25% of sites become unusable, usually due to some poorly implemented cookie consent popup. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by simply refusing to patronize these sites. I will selectively turn JS on in some specific cases where dynamic content is required to deliver the value prop.

> Most websites continue to work fine without it

> About 25% of sites become unusable

These two statements seem pretty contradictory. 75% feels like a low threshold for "most."

Most is more than half.

In casual conversation, I would never interpret most as being solely more than half. However, it seems like perhaps most people agree with you :)

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-eq...

In my entirely casual understanding of English most means the set that has more members than any other. When the comparison is binary (sites that work vs sites that don't) then "more than half" is both necessary and sufficient as a definition.

When comparing more than two options most could be significantly less than half (e.g. if I have two red balls, and one ball each of blue, purple, green, orange, pink, and yellow, then the color I have the most of is red, despite representing only one quarter of the total balls.)

That said, any attribute attaining more than half of the pie must be most.

In retrospect, the never in my previous comment was certainly an overstatement. While I agree with your reasoning, there is often a distinction between technically correct use of language, and what the hearer is likely to understand from what is said.

Same, I even wrote a chrome extension to enable js on the current domain using a keyboard shortcut; but it has gotten to be more of a pain especially on landing pages.

Even JS-heavy websites are moving towards being usable without Javascript with server side rendering.

Just explain why in a way that vanishes with JS enabled. Like other have said it'll not need to be used for long.

most websites these days already use javascript, and all modern browsers already support it. unless you're some really niche turbonerd website, nobody is going to notice or care...

The other kind of problem is if the website is not really proxied but rather dumped, patched and re-served. In such case the only option (if JavaScript frontend redirect doesn't work) is blocking by IP the dumping server.

To identify IPs, as pointed in the root comment of this thread, you can create a one-pixel link to a dummy page, which dumping software would visit, but a human wouldn't. So you will see who visited that specific page and block those IPs for good.

I would think you'd want to be careful about search engines with that approach. Assuming the OP wants their site indexed, you could end up unintentionally blocking crawlers.

Tail wagging the dog is never a good answer.

It's trivial to strip that "display: none" out, too.

Yea if they're already rewriting content to serve ads (likely since they're probably not doing this for altruistic reasons) you're just putting off the inevitable. While blocking or captcha'ing source IPs is also a cat and mouse game it's much more effective for a longer period of time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com