Show HN: Quixotic – a tool for wasting bot and LLM scraper time
marcusb.orgI get a lot of bot traffic, most of which doesn't appear to respect robots.txt, so I made a tool to easily rewrite my content to serve to these bots instead. It consists of two components:
quixotic - a command line tool that is static-site friendly to generate a copy of a website with some of the words replaced using a Markov generator.
linkmaze - a web server that I can send the worst bots to. It generates 100% Markov content on the fly and with random links that also refer to linkmaze content.
Wonderful.
You might also want to make it very slow to respond, so you are able to tie up their threads and memory and such for much longer.
You can probably manage your own threads considerably more intelligently than the offending bot does, allowing you to significantly increase their resource consumption without making a noticeable dent on your own.
That's a great idea. I'd also like to make it handle image content. Right now, it passes images through unaltered.
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