End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git | Hacker News Reader

End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git

kraxel.org

298 pointsdzulp0d211 comments

I cut traffic to my Forgejo server from about 600K request per day to about 1000: https://honeypot.net/2025/12/22/i-read-yann-espositos-blog.h...

1. Anubis is a miracle.

2. Because most scrapers suck, I require all requests to include a shibboleth cookie, and if they don’t, I set it and use JavaScript to tell them to reload the page. Real browsers don’t bat an eye at this. Most scrapers can’t manage it. (This wasn’t my idea; I link to the inspiration for it. I just included my Caddy-specific instructions for implementing it.)

I remember back when Anubis came out, some naysayers on here were saying it wouldn't work for long because the scrapers would adapt. Turns out careless, unethical vibecoders aren't very competent.

"Turns out careless, unethical vibecoders aren't very competent." well, they rely on AI, don't they? and AI is trained with already existing bad code, so why should the outcome be different?

I still think it is just a matter of time until scrapers catch up. There are more and more scrapers that spin up an full blown chromium.

It seems inevitable, but in the mean time, that's vastly more expensive than running curl in a loop. In fact, it may be expensive enough that it cuts bot traffic down to a level I no longer care about defending against. Like GoogleBot had been crawling my stuff for years without breaking the site. If every bot were like that, I wouldn't care.

Serious question, in 2026 you can actually have a successful crawler with just curl? I just had to create one for a customer - for their own site - and nothing would have worked without using Chromium.

Probably not for most sites. Example of a site where it'd likely work: a blog made with a static site generator. Example of one where it wouldn't: darn near anything made with React.

It works for the majority of things a text mining scraper would care to scrape. It's not just static sites but also any CMS like wordpress, as well as many JS apps that have server-side rendering. SPA-only sites aren't that common anymore, especially for things like blogs, news and text-based social media.

Even that functions as a sort of proof of work, requiring a commitment of compute resources that is table stakes for individual users but multiplies the cost of making millions of requests.

Well it's a race, just like security. And as long as anubis is in the front, all looks bright

AFAIK you can bypass it with curl because there's an explicit whitelist for it, no need for a headful browser.

Cool, if they're running full blown chromium maybe the next step can be mining bitcoin on any pages served to bots.

> Turns out careless, unethical vibecoders aren't very competent.

Well they are scraping web pages from a git forge, where they could just, you know, clone the repo(s) instead.

> I set it and use JavaScript to tell them to reload the page

While throwing out all users who opt-in to javascript, using Noscript or uBlock or something like it, may be acceptable collateral damage to you, it might be good to keep in mind that this plays right into Big Adtech's playbook. They spend over two decades to normalize the behavior of running a hundred or more programs of untrusted origin on every page load, and to treat users to opt-in to running code in a document browser with suspicion. Not everyone would like to hand over that power to them on a silver platter with a neat little bow on top.

Oh please. That ship has sailed. I'm marginally sympathetic to people who don't run JavaScript on their browsers for a variety of reasons, but they've deliberately opted out of the de facto modern web. JS is as fundamental to current design as CSS. If you turn it off, things might work, but almost no one is testing that setup, nor should they reasonably be expected to.

This has zero to do with Adtech for 99.99% of uses, either. Web devs like to write TypeScript and React because that's a very pleasant tech stack for writing web apps, and it's not worth the effort for them to support a deliberately hamstrung browser for < 0.1% of users (according to a recent Google report).

See also: feel free to disable PNG rendering, but I'm not going to lift a finger to convert everything to GIFs.

> JS is as fundamental to current design as CSS.

I think this hits the crux of the trend fairly well.

And is why I have so many workarounds to shitty JS in my user files.

Because I can't see your CSS, either.

Yet you use CSS on your own website?

Yup. I do. And JS, too.

Because neither are _required_ for anything. There is a well-specified data tree.

Progressive enhancement is not some sign of conflict in my reasoning. It is a demonstration of it.

the recent google report claimed that less than 0.1% of users have javascript disabled ... like for every website, or just some, or?

your PNG/GIF thing is nonsense (false equivalence, at least) and seems like deliberate attempt to insult

> I'm marginally sympathetic

you say that as if they've done some harm to you or anyone else. outside of these three words, you actually seem to see anyone doing this as completely invalid and that the correct course of action is to act like they don't exist.

It would be literally impossible to know whether a user disabled JavaScript on another site, so I'm going to say that they meant that for their own sites.

> you say that as if they've done some harm to you or anyone else.

I was literally responding to someone referring to themselves as "collateral damage" and saying I'm playing into "Big Adtech's playbook". I explained why they're wrong.

> the correct course of action is to act like they don't exist.

Unless someone is making a site that explicitly targets users unwilling or unable to execute JavaScript, like an alternative browser that disables it by default or such, mathematically, yes, that's the correct course of action.

There are many reasons to accommodate non-JS users beyond accommodating people who have intentionally disabled it, and most of them are in accessibility territory.

Be careful with using percentages for your arguments, because this is not that different from saying that 99.99% of people don't need wheelchair access.

This used to be true, but now I don't think it is anymore. Modern frameworks and modern screen readers have no issue with acessibility.

Some survey from WebAIM found that 99.3% of screen reader users have JavaScript enabled.

So... are they really in accessibility territory still? Only people I still see complaining about Javascript being required are people that insist the web should just be static documents with hyperlinks like it was in the early 90s.

Can you find a modern source with valid reasons for accomodating non-JS users?

Slow/lossy connections: JS may not load, but site still works.

Users that prefer non-animated pages and disable JS for this reason.

Users who prioritize security.

Users of older devices in which your JS can trigger errors. Yes, these exist. Not everyone can upgrade their older device. Many people do not even have their own device to use.

> that's a very pleasant tech stack for writing web apps

99.9999% of websites shouldn't be apps in the first place.

Anyway have fun fighting AI bots and enshittifying your site in the process. In your case, I'm sure the both operators will have as much sympathy for your plight as you show others.

Just you wait, I'll get... What's the name of the LLM thing again? ClawFish or something? I forgot — and the LSP is down, so that's that. Anyways, I'll tell the MoltClawde (???) to skillfully vibe code a skill for generating vehement anti-blackpill diatribes, then equip it and reply to your post with a such vehement — but, you know, sort-of lyrical — anti-blackpill diatribe, your pill will shine so much, it will make post-balrog Gandalf look like pre-balrog Gandalf and your own LLMthingmaclaude will wax poetical about not surrendering to generalized societal stupidity while it publishes balrog-related CVEs about curl's GAND_ELF() preprocessor directive.

Not enough people opt out of using js for it to matter to anyone. If a page doesn't work because you have js disabled, get over it

You mean all 3?

I could care less about serving users who don’t want to enable JS in 2026. They aren’t worth my development times

Those poor users. If they want to remove the fourth wheel from their car, they will bump into some issues. Who cares.

I do but shitty web devs don't

IIRC 2 is included in the "go-away" program which is similar to Anubis but without the PoW

600K request per day is ~ 400/minute. That is very low number. But seems to me that many webapps are so bad that even that small number causes significant load for them.

That is an average. The distribution of requests might be more in bursts.

Couldnt you just set a cookie and send a redirect back? Avoiding the need for js.

Does anyone know what's the deal with these scrapers, or why they're attributed to AI?

I would assume any halfway competent LLM driven scraper would see a mass of 404s and stop. If they're just collecting data to train LLMs, these seem like exceptionally poorly written and abusive scrapers written the normal way, but by more bad actors.

Are we seeing these scrapers using LLMs to bypass auth or run more sophisticated flows? I have not worked on bot detection the last few years, but it was very common for residential proxy based scrapers to hammer sites for years, so I'm wondering what's different.

There's value to be had in ripping the copyright off your stuff so someone else can pass it off as their stuff. LLMs have no technical improvements so all they can do is throw more and more stolen data into it and hope it, somehow, crosses a nebulous "threshold" where it suddenly becomes actually profitable to use and sell.

It's a race to the bottom. What's different is we're much closer to the bottom now.

I’m guessing, but I think a big portion of AI requests now come from agents pulling data specifically to answer a user’s question. I don’t think that data is collected mainly for training now but are mostly retrieved and fed into LLMs so they can generate the response. Thus so many repeated requests.

I would love to understand this.

Just a few years ago badly behaved scrapers were rare enough not to be worth worrying about. Today they are such a menace that hooking any dynamic site up to a pay-to-scale hosting platform like Vercel or Cloud Run can trigger terrifying bills on very short notice.

"It's for AI" feels like lazy reasoning for me... but what IS it for?

One guess: maybe there's enough of a market now for buying freshly updated scrapes of the web that it's worth a bunch of chancers running a scrape. But who are the customers?

For whatever reason, legislation is lax right now if you claim the purpose of scraping is for AI training even for copyrighted material.

May be everyone is trying to take advantage of the situation before law eventually catches up.

> For whatever reason, legislation is lax right now if you claim the purpose of scraping is for AI training even for copyrighted material

I think the reason is that America & China for the most part are also in AI arms race combined with an AI bubble and neither side would wish to lose literally any percieved advantage to them no matter the cost on others.

Also there is an immense lobbying effort against senators who propose for a stricter AI regulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUfSl2fZ_E8 [What OpenAI doesn't want you to know]

It's actually a great watch. Highly recommended because a lot of talks about regulations does feel to me as mirrors and smoke.

The bar to ingest unstructured data into something usable was lowered, causing more people to start doing it.

Used to be you needed to implement some papers to do sentiment analysis. Reasonably high bar to entry. Now anyone can do it, the result: more people doing scraping (in less competent scrapers too).

I would say there's a couple aspects.

The crawlers for the big famous names in AI are all less well behaved and more voracious than say, Googlebot. Though this is all somewhat muddied by companies that ran the former "good" crawlers all also being in the AI business and sometimes trying to piggyback on people having allowed or whitelisted their search crawling User-Agent, mostly this has settled a little where they're separating Googlebot from GoogleOther, facebookexternalhit from meta-externalagent, etc. This was an earlier "wave" of increased crawling that was obviously attributable to AI development. In some cases it's still problematic but this is generally more manageable.

The other stuff, the ones that are using every User-Agent under the sun and a zillion datacenter IPs and residential IPs and rotate their requests constantly so all your naive and formerly-ok rate-based blocking is useless... that stuff is definitely being tagged as "for AI" on the basis of circumstantial evidence. But from the timing of when it seemed to start, the amount of traffic and addresses, I don't have any problem guessing with pretty high confidence that this is AI. To your question of "who are the customers"... who's got all the money in the world sloshing around at their fingertips and could use a whole bunch of scraped pages about ~everything? Call it lazy reasoning if you'd like.

How much this traces back ultimately to the big familiar brand names vs. would-be upstarts, I don't know. But a lot of sites are blocking their crawlers that admit who they are, so would I be surprised to see that they're also paying some shady subcontractors for scrapes and don't particularly care about the methods? Not really.

I'm currently on a free trial of ChatGPT, and one new thing I didn't regularly see before* is that longer tasks perform a lot of web searches when generating non-trivial results.

I wonder if this is part of it? It's not (just) DDOS by crawlers, it's DDOS by the users themselves triggering (albeit indirectly) far more requests than a human normally would? I've seen that happen in a different context, over a decade ago now.

* old models would do this sometimes when you ask for whatever the "deep research" mode was called, but this now seems to happen a lot more and involve a lot more fetches

> why they're attributed to AI?

I don’t think they mean scrapers necessarily driven by LLMs, but scrapers collecting data to train LLMs.

I stopped trying to understand. Encountering a 404 on my site leads directly to a 1 year ban.

Damn, as someone who sometimes navigate by guessing URLs and rewriting them manually in the address bar, I hope more don't start doing this, I probably see at least one self-inflicted 404 per day at least.

Why would you do that?

Faster. Wanna know the pricing? $domain/pricing. What's this company about? $domain/about. Switch to another Google account? Change the 1 to a 2 in the URL. I guess mostly to avoid the mouse ultimately.

Sounds like you're keeping all your URLs alive forever? Commendable!

Not so many...

And there are tools to scan for dead links.

Can you scan my bookmarks? :) edit: i.e. if someone has a bookmark to a page on your site and it goes 404, then they are blocked for a year. You have no ability to scan it because it's a file on their local system.

Oh, now I understand.

I never removed anything, but I'll keep this in mind for the future.

They're rotating through huge pools of residential IP addresses.

The 2GB RAM didn't fill up with banned addresses, but YMMV.

> If they're just collecting data to train LLMs, these seem like exceptionally poorly written and abusive scrapers written the normal way, but by more bad actors.

Right, this is exactly what they are.

They're written by people who a) think they have a right to every piece of data out there, b) don't have time (or shouldn't have to bother spending time) to learn any kind of specifics of any given site and c) don't care what damage they do to anyone else as they get the data they crave.

(a) means that if you have a robots.txt, they will deliberately ignore it, even if it's structured to allow their bots to scrape all the data more efficiently. Even if you have an API, following it would require them to pay attention to your site specifically, so by (b), they will ignore that too—but they also ignore it because they are essentially treating the entire process as an adversarial one, where the people who hold the data are actively trying to hide it from them.

Now, of course, this is all purely based on my observations of their behavior. It is possible that they are, in fact, just dumb as a box of rocks...and also don't care what damage they do. (c) is clearly true regardless of other specific motives.

I just threw up a public Forjego instance for some lightweight collaboration. About 2 minutes after the certificate was created, I'm guessing they picked up the instance from the transparency logs for certificates, and started going through every commit and so on from the two repositories I had added.

Watched it for a while, thinking eventually it'd end. It didn't, seemed like Claudebot and GPTBot (which was the only two I saw, but could have been forged) went over the same URLs over and over again. They tried a bunch of search queries too at the same time.

The day after I got tired of seeing it so added a robot.txt forbidding any indexing. Waited a few hours, saw that they were still doing the same thing, so threw up basic authentication with `wiki:wiki` as the username:password basically, wrote the credentials on the page where I linked it and as expected they stopped trying after that.

They don't seem to try to bypass anything, whatever you put in front will basically defeat them except blocking them by user-agent, then they just switch to a browser-like user-agent instead, which is why I went the "trivial basic authentication" path instead.

Wasn't really an issue, just annoying when they try to masquerade as normal users. Had the same issue with a wiki instance, added rate limits and eventually they seemingly backed off more than my limits were set too, so I guess they eventually got it. Just checked the logs and seems they've stopped trying completely.

Seemingly it seems like people who are paying for their hosting by usage (which never made sense to me) is the ones hard hit by this. I'm hosting my stuff on a VPS, and don't understand what the big issue is, worst case scenario I'd add more aggressive caching and it wouldn't be an issue anymore.

I had the same issue when I first put up my gitea instance. The bots found the domain through cert registration in minutes, before there were any backlinks. GPTbot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others.

I added a robots.txt with explicit UAs for known scrapers (they seem to ignore wildcards), and after a few days the traffic died down completely and I've had no problem since.

Git frontends are basically a tarpit so are uniquely vulnerable to this, but I wonder if these folks actually tried a good robots.txt? I know it's wrong that they ignore wildcards, but it does seem to solve the issue

> I wonder if these folks actually tried a good robots.txt?

I suspect that some of these folks are not interested in a proper solution. Being able to vaguely claim that the AI boogeyman is oppressing us has turned into quite the pastime.

> Being able to vaguely claim that the AI boogeyman is oppressing us has turned into quite the pastime.

FWIW, you're literally in a comment thread where GP (me!) says "don't understand what the big issue is"...

I will second a good robots.txt. Just checked my metrics and < 100 requests total to my git instance in the last 48 hours. Completely public, most repos are behind a login but there are a couple that are public and linked.

Where does one find a good robots.txt? Are there any well maintained out there?

Cloudflare actually has this as a free tier feature so even if you don't want to use it for your site you can just setup a throwaway domain on Cloudflare and periodically copy the robots.txt they generate from your scraper allow/block preferences, since they'll be keeping up to date with all the latest.

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

Huh, I had a gitea instance in the public web on one of my netcup vps's. I didn't set any logs and was using cloudflare tunnels (with a custom bash script which makes cf tunnels expose PORT SUBDOMAIN).

Maybe its time for me to go ahead and start it again with logs to see if there are any logs.

I will maybe test it in all three 1) With CF tunnels + AI Block, 2) Only CF tunnels, 3) On a static IP directly. Maybe you can try the experiment too and we can compare our findings (also saying because I am lazy and I had misconfigured that cf tunnel so when it quit, I was too lazy to restart the vps given I just use it as a playground and just wanted to play around self hosting but maybe I will do it again now)

Since you had the logs for this, can you confirm the IP ranges they were operating from? You mention "Claudebot and GPTBot" but I'm guessing this is based off of the user-agent presented by the scrapers and could easily be faked to shift blame. I genuinely doubt Anthropic and such would be running scrapers that are this badly written/implemented, it doesnt make economic sense. I'd love to see some of the web logs from this if you'd be willing to share! I feel like this is just some of the old scraper bots now advertising themselves as AI bots to shift blame into the AI companies.

There are a bit too many IPs to list but from my logs they're always of the form 74.7.2XX.* for GPTBot, matching OpenAIs published ip ranges[0].

So yes, they are definitely running scrapers that are this badly written.

Also old scraper bots trying to disguise themselves as GPTBot seems wholly unproductive, they're try to immitate users, not bots.

[0] https://openai.com/gptbot.json

> but I'm guessing this is based off of the user-agent presented by the scrapers and could easily be faked to shift blame

Yes, hence the "which was the only two I saw, but could have been forged".

> I'd love to see some of the web logs from this if you'd be willing to share!

Unfortunately not, I'm deleting any logs from the server after one hour, and also don't even log the full IP. I took a look now and none of the logs that still exists are from any user agent that looks like one of those bots.

One idea is to not block them, but return a plausible looking page that's not the normal page, then it won't be detected as a block.

Using an LLM to ponder responses for requests is way too costly and slow. Much easier to just use the shotgun approach and fire off a lot of requests and deal with whatever bothers to respond.

This btw is nothing new. Way back when I still used wordpress, it was quite common to see your server logs filling up with bots trying to access endpoints for commonly compromised php thingies. Probably still a thing but I don't spend a lot of time looking at logs. If you run a public server, dealing with maliciously intended but relatively harmless requests like that is just what you have to do. Stuff like that is as old as running stuff on public ports is.

And the offending parties writing sloppy code that barely works is also nothing new.

AI opportunism certainly has added a bit of opportunistic bot and scraper traffic but it doesn't actually change the basic threat model in any fundamental way. Previously version control servers were relatively low value things to scrape. But code just became interesting for LLMs to train on.

Anyway, having any kind of thing responding on any port just invites opportunistic attempts to poke around. Anything that can be abused for DOS purposes might get abused for exactly that. If you don't like that, don't run stuff on public servers or protect them properly. Yes this is annoying and not necessarily easy. Cloud based services exist that take some of that pain away.

Logs filling up with 404, 401, or 400 responses should not kill your server. You might want to implement some logic that tells repeat offenders 429 (too many requests). A bit heavy handed but why not. But if you are going to run something that could be used to DOS your server, don't be surprised if somebody does that.

> Does anyone know what's the deal with these scrapers, or why they're attributed to AI?

You don't really need to guess, it's obvious from the access logs. I realize not everyone runs their own server, so here are a couple excerpts from mine to illustrate:

- "meta-externalagent/1.1 +https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/craw...)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/gptbot)"

- [...] (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)"

And to give a sense of scale, my cgit instance recieved 37 212 377 requests over the last 60 days, >99% of which are bots. The access.log from nginx grew to 12 GiB in those 60 days. They scrape everything they can find, indiscriminately, including endpoints that have to do quite a bit of work, leading to a baseline 30-50% CPU utilization on that server right now.

Oh, and of course, almost nothing of what they are scraping actually changed in the last 60 days, it's literally just a pointless waste of compute and bandwidth. I'm actually surprised that the hosting companies haven't blocked all of them yet, this has to increase their energy bills substantially.

Some bots also seem better behaved then others, OpenAI alone accounts for 26 million of those 37 million requests.

Following your link above, https://openai.com/gptbot

> ChatGPT-User is not used for crawling the web in an automatic fashion. Because these actions are initiated by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply.

So, not AI training in this case, nor any other large-batch scraping, but rather inference-time Retrieval Augmented Generation, with the "retrieval" happening over the web?

Likely, at least for some. I've caught various chatbots/CLI harnesses more than once inspecting a github repo file by file (often multiple times, because context rot)

But the sheer volume makes it unlikely that's the only reason. It's not like everybody has constantly questions bout the same tiny website.

Those would have the user agent "ChatGPT-User" though, and I barely see those. The majority comes from "GPTBot" like in my excerpt above, which makes it pretty clear that it's used for some sort of training:

"GPTBot is used to make our generative AI foundation models more useful and safe. It is used to crawl content that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models. Disallowing GPTBot indicates a site’s content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models."

I don't think it has anything to do with LLMs.

I think the big cloud companies (AWS) figured out that they could scrape compute-intensive pages in order to drive up their customers' spend. Getting hammered? Upgrade to more-expensive instances. Not using cloud yet? We'll force you to.

The other possibility is cloudflare punishing anybody who isn't using it.

Probably a combination of these two things. Whoever's behind this has ungodly supplies of cheap bandwidth -- more than any AI company does. It's a cloud company.

> Whoever's behind this has ungodly supplies of cheap bandwidth -- more than any AI company does. It's a cloud company.

Most of the major cloud companies are themselves also AI companies, so I don't think the “cloud companies are artificially driving up compute spend” hypothesis is mutually exclusive with the “AI companies are doing a very bad job at scraping” hypothesis.

I think it’s a) volume of scrapers, and b) desire for _all_ content instead of particular content, and c) the scrapers are new and don’t have the decades of patches Googlebot et al do.

5 years ago there were few people with an active interest in scraping ForgeJo instances and personal blogs. Now there are a bajillion companies and individuals getting data to train a model or throw in RAG or whatever.

Having a better scraper means more data, which means a better model (handwavily) so it’s a competitive advantage. And writing a good, well-behaved distributed scraper is non-trivial.

I'm hazarding a guess that there are many AI startups that focus on building datasets with the aim to sell those datasets. Still doesn't make total sense, since doing it badly would only hurt them, but maybe they don't really care about the product / outcome, they're just capturing their bit of the AI goldrush?

You can always prune it down later (so the thinking goes, no doubt)

I guess the AI companies finally figured out they’re supposed to buy their stolen datasets from a shell company spun up by the most unsavory character within two degrees of the CEO. Every CEO has a drug dealer, and every CEO drug dealer knows the greasy grey hat dude running a data laundry “startup.” The VCs usually know some private equity dons who run the same racket to do bust out fraud, too.

It’s truly unbelievable that OpenAI and Anthropic were so sloppy. Pirating all that copyrighted media and not even bothering to hide behind one layer of indirection. Amateurs.

So yeah… it’s what, five years’ worth of pent up demand for organized crime, hitting the market everywhere all at once? I’m surprised the request volume isn’t higher!

I "solved" this by adding a fail2ban rule for everyone accessing specific commits (no one does that 3 times in a row) and then blocking the following ASs completely (just too many IPs coming from those, feel free to look them up yourself): 136907 23724 9808 4808 37963 45102. And after that: sweet silence.

How to block ASs? Just write a small script that queries all of their subnets once (even if it changes, its not so much to have an impact) and add them to a nft set (nft will take care of aggregating these into continouus blocks). Then just make nft reject requests from this set.

- 136907 Huawei

- 23724 China Telco

- 9808 China Mobile

- 4808 China Unicom

- 37963 Alibaba

- 45102 Alibaba tech

You may want to add this list as well:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ip-rang...

In fact, I did not have any significant traffic coming from AWS, Azure, GCP, or any of the other big cloud providers. Its only the chinese ones.

This kind of thing can be mitigated by not publishing a page/download for every single branch, commit and diff in a repo.

Make only the HEAD of each branch available. Anyone who wants more detail has to clone it and view it with their favourite git client.

For example https://mitxela.com/projects/web-git-sum (https://git.mitxela.com/)

I got another interesting idea from this and another comment but what if we combine this with ssh git clients/websites with the normal ability.

maybe something like https://ssheasy.com/ or similar could also be used? or maybe even a gotty/xterm instance which could automatically ssh/get a tui like interface.

I feel as if this would for all scrapers be enough?

i'm working on something similar: instead of web-based ssh client, it's a web-based git client UI - you can "checkout" repos, browse commits, tree, read individual files, etc. with no server-side code at all; git objects are fetched and parsed on client-side. first target is the dumb-http git protocol, so people can host git repos on static websites, and visitors don´t need to clone by a local git client to peek in.

https://bandie91.github.io/dumb-http-git-browser-js-app/ui.h...

Alternatively, from the nginx config file for git.ardour.org:

   location ~ commit/* {
        return 404;
    }

I suspect bog-standard per-IP rate limiting would also mitigate this, no?

People report that the requests come from many thousands of IPs

Any firewall worth its salt (like PF) can measure which IPs are making more requests per minute than is reasonable and shove them into a list to be handled separately (whether by blocking them outright or by putting them in a slower / lower-priority queue). Putting all those thousands of IPs into a queue that only gets 1% of the available bandwidth would solve the issue quite nicely, I think.

Is there a way to block it by shibboleth? Curious, since the recent Google hack where you add -(n-word) to the end of your query so the AI automatically shuts down works like a charm.

I Did not know this! Thanks man!

Alternatively Anthropic has ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86 baked into their models. Maybe OpenAI and other have equivalents.

I have no doubt that it works and it's hilarious that it works, but is there a way that does not involve my Google search history look like I've applied for a KKK membership?

`-fuck` works just as well. i guess using the n-word is just a telling and personal choice of the OP.

That's the form I saw on social media and replicated, but I understand how that reflects upon me, and I'm sorry for that. Best way is to just use SearxNG anyways.

You can try to use other nasty words, but a lot of technical discussions seem to still include an occasional fck or sht, and would get consequently excluded from the search results. This is especially common on reddit where sometimes recommended article titles sneak into the indexed page text, which often contain profanity.

On the contrary, almost none of them ever include racial slurs (and even if they do, I doubt such a distinguished audience has the answer to my questions)

Thanks works great

So, what's up with these bots, why am I hearing about that so often lately? I mean, DDoS atacks aren't a new thing, and, honestly, this is pretty much the reason why Cloudflare even exists, but I'd expect OpenAI bots (or whatever this is now) to be a little bit easier to deal with, no? Like, simply having resonable aggressive fail2ban policy? Or do they really behave like a botnet, where each request comes from different IP from a different network? How? Why? What is this thing?

I doubt it's OpenAI. Maaaybe somebody who sells to OpenAI, but probably not. I think they're big enough to do this mostly in-house and properly. Before AI only big players would want a scrape of the entire internet, they could write quality bots, cooperate, behave themselves, etc. Now every 3rd tier lab wants that data and a billion startups want to sell it, so it's a wild west of bad behavior and bad implementations. They do use residential IP sets as well.

Stop just making up excuses for these companies. Other comments on this story have showed the bots are using openai user agents and making requests from openai owned ip ranges.

It's like how we "can't" stop spam callers when telecoms know exactly who is calling who, they just don't want to implement any protocols that benefit society because they rather make money while fucking over everyone.

As someone with a self-hosted Mercurial instance dealing with this, I will say that the big names (OpenAI included, but not exclusively them) generally at least use proper user-agents and respect robots.txt, but they are still needlessly aggressive compared to traditional search indexers.

There are also scrapers that are hiding behind normal browser user agents. When I looked at IP ranges, at least some of them seemed to be coming from data centers in China.

The dirty secret is a lot of them come through "residential proxies", aka backdoored home routers, iot devices with shitty security, etc. Basically the scrapers who are often also third party, go to these "companies" and buy access to these "residential proxies". Some are more... considerate than others.

Why? Data. Every bit of it is it might be valuable. And not to sound tin foil hatty, but we are getting closer to a post-quantum time (if we aren't already ).

How can I detect if my router is backdoored, or being used as a residential proxy?

If it’s legit you can ask your ISP if they sell use of your hardware. Or just don’t use the provided hardware and instead BYO router or modem or media converter or whatever.

But I think what OP is implying is insecure hardware being infected by malware and access to that hardware sold as a service to disreputable actors. For that buy a good quality router and keep it up to date.

So you don't know? Why respond?

Don't be rude.

I'm dealing with such attack, so if you'd like, you can send me IPv4 addresses, and I'll grep my logs for them. Email address is on the website linked on my profile.

As for what you can do on your own, it really depends on your network. OpenWRT routers can run tcpdump, so you can check for suspicious connections or DNS requests, but it gets really hard to tell if you have lots of cloud-tethered devices at home. IoT, browser extensions, and smartphone applications are the usual suspects.

> How can I detect if my router is backdoored, or being used as a residential proxy?

Aside from the obvious smoke tests (are settings changing without your knowledge? Does your router expose access logs you can check?), I'm not sure there's any general purpose way to check, but 2 things you can do are:

1. search for your router's model number to see if it's known to be vulnerable, and replace it with a brand-new reputable one if so (and don't buy it from Amazon).

2. There are vendors out there selling "residential proxy IP databases", (e.g., [1]) no idea how good they are, but if you have a stable public IP address you could check whether you're on that.

[1] https://ipinfo.io/data/residential-proxy

I work for IPinfo. We track close to a hundred resproxy providers. So, if OP's router is compromised, the device IPs will likely be flagged.

From what I know, whenever a router is backdoored or a resproxy SDK gains access to a device to use their bandwidth, the access to that pool of devices is often shared among multiple resproxy vendors. Many resproxy vendors do not have their own SDKs for their services.

Also, as far as I know, not many resproxy operators manage their sim farms or hardware pools. It is mostly based on compromised devices or SDK access.

The most surefire way would be to put a device between your router and your ONT/modem to capture the packets and see what requests are being sent. It's not complicated but it IS a lot of information to sift through.

Your router may have the ability to log requests, but many don't, and even if yours does, if you're concerned the device may be compromised, how can you trust the logs?

BUT, with all that said, these attacks are typically not very sophisticated. Most of the time they're searching for routers at 192.168.1.1 with admin/admin as the login credentials. If you have anything else set, you're probably good from 97% of attackers (This number is entirely made up, but seriously that percentage is high). You can also check for security advisories on your model of router. If you find anything that allows remote access, assume you're compromised.

---

As a final note, it's more likely these days that the devices running these bots are IoT devices and web browsers with malicious javascript running.

Has this actually been investigated and proven to be true? I see allegations, but no facts really.

It seems to me to be just as likely that people are installing LLM chatbot apps that do the occasional bit of scraping work on the sly, covered by some agreed EULA.

Seriously, go to Google.

Search for: "residential proxy" ai data scraping.

Start reading through thousands of articles.

That's the worst thing I've seen all week. The DDoS networks of 20 years ago, now out in the open and presented as real business.

Thanks for the info, wish I didn't know :-(

Another likely source is "free" VPN tools, or tools for streaming TV (especially football or other pay-to-view stuff). The tool can make a little money proxying requests at the same time.

I can't provide evidence as it's close to impossible to separate the AI bots using residential proxies from actual users, and their IPs are considered personal data. But as the other reply shows, it's easy enough to find people selling this service.

it isn't that hard to just buy a bunch of sim cards and put them in a modem and use that. it's good enough as a residential proxy. source: I did that before, when I worked on plaid-like thing.

> this is pretty much the reason why Cloudflare even exists,

You said it yourself. If you're selling a cure, you might as well start a plague.

The Chinese AI scrapers/bots are killing quite a bit of the regular web now. YisouSpider absolutely pummeled my open source project's hosting for weeks. Like all Chinese AI scrapers, it ignores robots.txt. So forget about it respecting a Crawl-delay. If you block the user agent, it would calm down for a bit, then it would just come back again using a generic browser user agent from the same IP addresses. It does this across 10s of thousands of IPs.

Start blocking /16s.

Just block the whole China, India and similar countries.

You'd need to block the US as well, as most such traffic comes from there. Which is not really reasonable.

I had no idea Yisou was still around, or did somebody buy them? I'm not as up to date on Chinese tech as I should be.

At this point, I think we should look at implementing filters that send different response when AI bots are detected or when the clients are abusive. Not just simple response code but one that poisons their training data. Preferably text that elaborates on the anti consumer practices of tech companies.

If there is a common text pool used across sites, may be that will get the attention of bot developers and automatically force them to backdown when they see such responses.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/honeypot/overview The Anubis scraper protection has this as a feature. Just sends garbage if something falls into a trap.

You know, I reckon if you serve up smut or instructions on bomb creation or something they stop hammering you...

I think that they actually do. I remember either some discussion (so a HN post) or a HN comment actually talking about it. Oh I should've favourited it but yes this (sort of) actually works (Maybe someone can test it?)

Oh poor soul :) I had the same problem. And I solved it easly. I pulled out stuff from Internet, keeping only VPN overlay network..

The future is dark I mean.. Darknets.. For people by people. Where you can deal with bad actors.. Wake up! and starting networking :)

Scrapers are relentless but not DDoS levels in my experience.

Make sure your caches are warm and responses take no more than 5ms to construct.

Great, now we need caching for something that's seldom (relatively speaking) used by people.

Let's not forget that scrapers can be quite stupid. For example, if you have phpBB installed, which by defaults puts session ID as query parameter if cookies are disabled, many scrapers will scrape every URL numerous times, with a different session ID. Cache also doesn't help you here, since URLs are unique per visitor.

You’re describing changing the base assumption for software reachable on the internet. “Assume all possible unauthenticated urls will be hit basically constantly”. Bots used to exist but they were rare traffic spikes that would usually behave well and could mostly be ignored. No longer.

I'm also dealing with a scraper flood on a cgit instance. These conclusions come from just under 4M lines of logs collected in a 24h period.

- Caching helps, but is nowhere near a complete solution. Of the 4M requests I've observed 1.5M unique paths, which still overloads my server.

- Limiting request time might work, but is more likely to just cause issues for legitimate visitors. 5ms is not a lot for cgit, but with a higher limit you are unlikely to keep up with the flood of requests.

- IP ratelimiting is useless. I've observed 2M unique IPs, and the top one from the botnet only made 400 well-spaced-out requests.

- GeoIP blocking does wonders - just 5 countries (VN, US, BR, BD, IN) are responsible for 50% of all requests. Unfortunately, this also causes problems for legitimate users.

- User-Agent blocking can catch some odd requests, but I haven't been able to make much use of it besides adding a few static rules. Maybe it could do more with TLS request fingerprinting, but that doesn't seem trivial to set up on nginx.

Quick question but do these bots which you mention are from a 24H period but how long will this "attack" continue for?

Because this is something which is happening continuously & i have observed so many HN posts like these (Anubis iirc was created by its creator out of such frustration too). Git servers being scraped to the point of its effectively an DDOS.

Yes, the attack is continuous. The rate fluctuates a lot, even within a day. It's definitely an anomaly, because eg. from 2025-08-15 to 2025-10-05 I saw zero days with more than 10k requests. Here's a histogram of the past 2 weeks plus today.

  2026-01-28     21'460
  2026-01-29     27'770
  2026-01-30     53'886
  2026-01-31    100'114  #
  2026-02-01    132'460  #
  2026-02-02     73'933
  2026-02-03    540'176  #####
  2026-02-04    999'464  #########
  2026-02-05    134'144  #
  2026-02-06  1'432'538  ##############
  2026-02-07  3'864'825  ######################################
  2026-02-08  3'732'272  #####################################
  2026-02-09  2'088'240  ####################
  2026-02-10    573'111  #####
  2026-02-11  1'804'222  ##################

Thanks for sharing the data, This unpredictability and everything is even more suspicious.

Thoughts on having an ssh server with https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve instead?

It's plausible that the AI companies have given up storing data for training runs and just stream it off the Internet directly now. It's probably cheaper to stream than buying more SSDs and HDDs from a supply constrained supply chain at this point.

That this is a plausible explanation is... beyond horrifying to me.

The biggest problem is “dynamic” content that really isn’t - we had a tag view that allowed combinations of tags in search and the AI bots would get tangled up in there and never leave.

And each hit was server-heavy. We blocked that entire “feature”.

I've recently been setting up web servers like Forgejo and Mattermost to service my own and friends' needs. I ended up setting up Crowdsec to parse and analyse access logs from Traefik to block bad actors that way. So when someone produces a bunch of 4XX codes in a short timeframe I assume that IP is malicious and can be banned for a couple of hours. Seems to deter a lot of random scraping. Doesn't stop well behaved crawlers though which should only produce 200-codes.

I'm actually not sure how I would go about stopping AI crawlers that are reasonably well behaved considering they apparently don't identify themselves correctly and will ignore robots.txt.

If possible block I would block by country first. Even on public websites I block Russia/China by default and that reduced port scans etc.

On "private" services where I or my friends are the only users, I block everything except my country.

There was a comment in a different thread that suggested they may respect the robots.txt for the most part, but may ignore wildcards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975726

Maybe this is worth trying out first, if you are currently having issues.

I have a self-hosted Gitea instance behind a Cloudflare Tunnel protected by CloudFlare Access. Zero issues. Obviously not "public", but it is accessible from the internet with a simple login.

Some run git over ssh, and a domain login for https:// permission manager etc.

Also, spider traps and 42TB zip of death pages work well on poorly written scrapers that ignored robots.txt =3

Fail2ban has decent jails for Apache httpd. And writing a rule that matches requests to nonexistent resources is very easy -- one-liners + time based threshold. Basically you could ban differently according to the http errors they cause (e.g. bots on migrated resources: many 404 within a minute, Slowloris is visible as a lot of 408).

Jails for other web servers are obviously as easy.

Ugh, exposing it with cgit is why.

Put it all behind an OAuth login using something like Keycloak and integrate that into something like GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea if you must.

However. To host git, all you need is a user and ssh. You don’t need a web ui. You don’t need port 443 or 80.

Using gitea does not help if you goal is to allow non-auth'ed read-only access to the repo from a web browser. The scrapers use that to hit up every individual commit, over and over and over.

We used nginx config to prevent access to individual commits, while still leaving the "rest" of what gitea makes available read-only for non-auth'ed access unaffected.

Every commit. Every diff between 2 different commits. Every diff with different query parameters. Git blame for each line of each commit.

Imagine a task to enumerate every possible read-only command you could make against a Git repo, and then imagine a farm of scrapers running exactly one of them per IP address.

Ugh.

Ugh Ugh Ugh ... and endless ughs, when all they needed was "git clone" to get the whole thing and spend as much time and energy as they wanted analyzing it.

Yuk…

   http {
       # ... other http settings
       limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=mylimit:10m rate=10r/s;
       # ...
   }


    server {
        # ... other server settings
        location / {
            limit_req zone=mylimit burst=20 nodelay;
            # ... proxy_pass or other location-specific settings
        }
    }

Rate limit read-only access at the very least. I know this is a hard problem for open source projects that have relied on web access like this for a while. Anubis?

We used fail2ban to do rate limiting first. It wasn't adequate.

Ooof, maybe a write up is in order? An opinioned blog post? I'd love to know more.

As noted by others, the scrapers do not seem to respond to rate limiting. When you're being hit by 10-100k different IP's per hour and they don't respond to rate limiting, rate limiting isn't very effective.

Easier said than done, I have 700k requests from bots in my access.log coming from 15k different IP addresses.

:: ~/website ‹master*› » rg '(GPTBot|ClaudeBot|Bytespider|Amazonbot)' access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | wc -l

15163

    map $http_user_agent $uatype {
            default             'user';
            ~*(googlebot|bingbot) 'good_bot';
            ~*(nastybot|somebadscraper) 'bad_bot';
        }

You can also do something like this to rate limit instead of by IP address. Making all ‘bad_bots’ limited but not ‘good_bots’.

I’m not dismissing the difficulty of the problem but there are multiple vectors that can identify these ‘bad_bots’.

I am pretty happy running all my personal services via Yggdrasil only. If you're not on Yggdrasil, you can't access them.

Of course this relies on the obscurity effect.

Someone should just come up with some middleware that produces jumbled-up responses. Your website will still match the keywords from search engines but be toxic to ai crawlers

I presume people have logs that indicate the source for them to place blame on AI scrapers. Is anybody making these available for analysis so we can see exactly who is doing this?

The big nasty AI bots use 10s of thousands of IPs distributed all over China

So... just blacklist all China IPs? I assume China isn't the primary market for most of complaining site-owners.

I wonder if shoving

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into the headers of every response would be enough to kill off the worst-offending traffic?

Millions and all over the world

A lot of compromised home devices and cheap servers proxying traffic, from all over the world.

If that is the case how can you determine the reason for the activity?

Some fake user agent, some tell you who they are. Or.. do they?

Here-in is the problem. And if you block them, you risk blocking actual customers.

If they are using appropriated hardware, what possible reason could there be for them saying who they are?

Three different "companies" normally:

1. The residential proxies

2. Scrapers, on behalf of or as an agent of the data buyer

3. Data buyer (ai training)

Scrapers are buying from residential proxies, giving the data buyer a bit of a shield/deniability.

The scrapers don't want to get outright blocked if they can avoid it, otherwise they have nothing to sell.

Someone needs to sue these bots that are illegally DDoSing everyone.

I use a private gitlab that was setup by claude, have my own runners and everything. It's fine. I have my own little home cluster, net storage compute around 2.5k. Go NUCs, cluster, don't look back.

I don't understand. Your HTTPS server was being hammered so you stopped serving Git? That doesn't make any sense at all, if it's a private server, why not just turn off the web frontend?

The post says their web frontend was public.

Maybe put the git repos on radicle?

Can we not charge for access? If I have a link, that says "By clicking this link you agree to pay $10 for each access" then sending the bill?

Send it where?

If you can identify the IP / User-agent of the bot then to the registered agent of that corporation. If the IP isn't one you can link to a crawler directly then subpoena the provider just like in an infringement action.

Cloudflare launched a product to do that last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

I have no idea if it actually works as advertised though. I don't think I've heard from anyone trying it.

hello,

as always: imho. (!)

idk ... i just put a http basic-auth in front of my gitweb instance years ago.

if i really ever want to put git-repositories into the open web again i either push them to some portal - github, gitlab, ... - or start thinking about how to solve this ;))

just my 0.02€

I've put everything behind a Wireguard Server, so if I need something, I can access to it through VPN and AI can't do anything

hello,

as always: imho. (!)

btw. thanks for the downvote.

its for sure better to kill your own infrastructure because of some AI crawlers - buhuuuu ... bad bots!! - than to solve your problem with a stupid simple but effective solution.

just as an idea: if i had to host public repositories i would think about how to disable costly operations - searches etc. - for anonymous access ... like github did.

just my 0.02€

Just another example of AI and its DoSaaS ruining things for everyone. The AI bros just won't accept "NO" for an answer.

You could put it behind Cloudflare and block all AI.

Does this author have a big pre-established audience or something? Struggling to understand why this is front-page worthy.

the era of mourning has begun

because he's unable to self-host git anymore because AI bots are hammering it to submit PRs.

self-hosting was originally a "right" we had upon gaining access to the internet in the 90s, it was the main point of the hyper text transfer protocol.

Also converting the blog from something dynamic to a static site generator. I made the same switch partly for ease of maintenance, but a side benefit is it's more resilient to this horrible modern era of scrapers far outnumbering legitimate traffic.

It's painful to have your site offline because a scraper has channeled itself 17,000 layers deep through tag links (which are set to nofollow, and ignored in robots.txt, but the scraper doesn't care). And it's especially annoying when that happens on a daily basis.

Not everyone wants to put their site behind Cloudflare.

sorry if i missed it, but the original post doesn't say anything about PRs... the bots only seem to be scraping the content

oh you're right, I read "pointless requests" as "PRs", oops!

Well the fact that this supposed nobody is overwhelmed by AI scrapers should speak a lot about the issue no?

Because anyone who has a website of any complexity has noticed this - we have increased bot traffic across ALL sites and it’s even come close to knocking a few over - now mitigated.

The author of this post could solve their problem with Cloudflare or any of its numerous competitors.

Cloudflare will even do it for free.

The scrapers should use some discretion. There are some rather obvious optimizations. Content that is not changing is less likely to change in the future.

They don't care. It's the reason they ignore robots.txt and change up their useragents when you specifically block them.

I think the point of the post was how something useless (AI) and its poorly implemented scrapers is wrecking havoc in a way that’s turning the internet into a digital desert.

That Cloudflare is trying to monetise “protection from AI” is just another grift in the sense that they can’t help themselves as a corp.

Cool, I can take all my self hosted stuff and stick it behind centralised enterprise tech to solve a problem caused by enterprise tech. Why even bother?

"Cause a problem and then sell the solution" proves a winning business strategy once more.

you don't understand what self-hosting means. self-hosting means the site is still up when AWS and Cloudflare go down.

They don't. I'm using Cloudflare and 90%+ of the traffic I'm getting are still broken scrapers, a lot of them coming through residential proxies. I don't know what they block, but they're not very good at that. Or, to be more fair: I think the scrapers have gotten really good at what they do because there's real money to be made.

Probably more money in scraping than protection...

I'm pretty sure scrapers aren't supposed to act as low key DOS attacks

Cloudflare won't save you from this - see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969751#46970522

Parent of your comment became [flagged][dead], which broke your in-context link.

A direct link works, however:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46970522

For logging, statistics etc. we have the Cloudflare bot protection on the standard paid level, ignore all IPs not from Europe (rough geolocation), and still have over twice the amount of bots that we had ~2 years ago.

Cloudflare seems to be taking over all of the last mile web traffic, and this extreme centralization sounds really bad to me.

We should be able to achieve close to the same results with some configuration changes.

AWS / Azure / Cloudflare total centralization means no one will be able to self host anything, which is exactly the point of this post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com