[aspir]

Just a callout that Fastly provides free bot detection, CDN, and other security services for FOSS projects, and has been for 10+ years https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward (disclaimer, I work for Fastly and help with this program)

Without going into too much detail, this tracks with the trends in inquiries we're getting from new programs and existing members. A few years ago, the requests were almost exclusively related to performance, uptime, implementing OWASP rules in a WAF, or more generic volumetric impact. Now, AI scraping is increasingly something that FOSS orgs come to us for help with.

[Aachen]

I've been running into bot detection on at least five different websites in the past two months (not even including captcha walls)

Not sure what to tell you but I surely feel quite human

Three of the pages told me to contact customer support and the other two were a hard and useless block wall. Only from Codeberg did I get a useful response, the other two customer supports were the typical "have you tried clearing your cookies" and restart the router advice — which is counterproductive because cookie tracking is often what lets one pass. Support is not prepared to deal with this, which means I can't shop at the stores that have blocking algorithms erroneously going off. I also don't think any normal person would ever contact support, I only do it to help them realise there's a problem and they're blocking legitimate people from using the internet normally

Beware if you employ this...

[RVuRnvbM2e]

Were the walls you hit caused by Fastly's bot detection? I've found it to be quite accurate.

On the other hand CloudFlare and Akamai mistakenly block me all the damn time.

[999900000999]

To be fair,

>I'm Not a Robot (film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Not_a_Robot_(film)