Latest version of Anubis has a JavaScript-free verification system. It isn’t as accurate, so I allow js-free visits only if the site isn’t being hammered. Which, tbf, prior to Anubis no one was getting in, JS or no JS.

Yay! I won’t edit my comment (so your comment will make sense) but I checked and they also list they/them on their github profile

I’ll say the developer is also very responsive. They’re (ambiguous ‘they’, not sure of pronouns) active in a libraries-fighting-bots slack channel I’m on. Libraries have been hit hard by the bots: we have hoards of tasty archives and we don’t have money to throw resources at the problem.

Yep. I just don’t tend to have tasks that require much state, they’re all pretty easy to pick up or put down.

I’ve had positions where I would get in the zone and didn’t want to be interrupted, I get how that feels. It’s lovely. I used to sit and rework test cases to handle updated requirements across dozens of files, back when I was in QA doing automated testing.

This study emphasizes to me that I’m not a dev, I’m the library’s designated techie (aka a systems librarian). I do write scripts, but mostly I maintain servers, help coworkers with CSS, and figure out what obscure setting is assigning unwanted overdue book fines (under Configuration Menu > Fulfillment > Physical Fulfillment > Advanced Policy Configuration, naturally).

I enjoy interruptions because they help me prioritize my day.

I’m with Great Aunt whomever. Flying sucks.

Plus, you could make it an event or party car. Imagine a traveling bachelorette party with a murder mystery dinner, karaoke, no flying, no driving, and you end up somewhere cool and can nap on the way back.

(100% of the pre-wedding parties I’ve been to have had karaoke and a murder mystery dinner. Sample set of one.)

My new doctor’s office is the first I’ve had that didn’t ask. It’s so refreshing. Like, I’m coming in because I suspect I have hEDS. I can bend my limbs weird. Menstruation doesn’t come into it.

Hmmm. Extra moist insides.

I mean, I enjoy linux sysadmining, but fighting bots takes time, experimentation, and research, and there’s other stuff I should be doing. For example, accessibility updates to our websites. But, accessibility doesn’t matter a lick if you can’t access the website anyway due to timeouts.

Yep, they’ll just burn taxpayer resources (me and my poor servers) because it’s not like they pay taxes anyway (assuming they are either a corporation or not based in the same locality as I am).

There’s only one of me and if I’m working on keeping the servers bare minimum functional today I’m not working on making something more awesome for tomorrow. “Linux sysadmin” is only supposed to be up to 30% of my job.

Fair! Yellow as anonymizer makes sense. I tend to use emojis in forms of communication where people already know me, like on discord and professional channels.

Like I said, [edit: at one point] Facebook requested my robots.txt multiple times a second. You’ve not convinced me that bot writers care about efficiency.

[edit: they’ve since stopped, possibly because now I give a 404 to anything claiming to be from facebook]

I just looked at my log for this morning. 23% of my total requests were from the useragent GoogleOther. Other visitors include GPTBot, SemanticScholarBot, and Turnitin. That’s the crawlers that are still trying after I’ve had Anubis on the site for over a month. It was much, much worse before, when they could crawl the site, instead of being blocked.

That doesn’t include the bots that lie about being bots. Looking back at an older screenshot of a monitors—I don’t have the logs themselves anymore—I seriously doubt I had 43,000 unique visitors using Windows per day in March.

Timing and request patterns. The increase in traffic coincided with the increase in AI in the marketplace. Before, we’d get hit by bots in waves and we’d just suck it up for a day. Now it’s constant. The request patterns are deep deep solr requests, with far more filters than any human would ever use. These are expensive requests and the results aren’t any more informative that just scooping up the nicely formatted EAD/XML finding aids we provide.

And, TBH, I don’t care if it’s AI. I care that it’s rude. If the bots respected robots.txt then I’d be fine with them. They don’t and they break stuff for actual researchers.

You’re right. AI didn’t just triple the traffic to my tiny archive’s site. It way more than tripled it. After implementing Anubis, we went from 3000 ‘unique’ visitors down to 20 in a half-day. Twenty is a much more expected number for a small college archive in the summer. That’s before I did any fine-tuning to Anubis, just the default settings.

I was getting constant outage reports. Now I’m not.

For us, it’s not about protecting our IP. We want folks to get to find out information. That’s why we write finding aids, scan it, accession it. But, allowing bots to siphon it all up inefficiently was denying everyone access to it.

And if you think bots aren’t inefficient, explain why Facebook requests my robots.txt 10 times a second.

I use them because I want to push back against the assumption that white is the default. If not-white people pick a skin tone and white people stay yellow, then yellow gets read as white, not color-neutral.

And yes, it felt so awkward to choose the white emoji at first.

I’ll cry all the way to the bank and doctor, what with my retroactive pay raise, my pretty awesome health insurance, and my liberal time off. We even got hazard pay during the early pandemic (if we were in a position where we had to see people in person).

My union (AFSCME) bargains alongside the state cops. You might say it’s a union of unions. ACAB, but they get good benefits and never have a pay reduction. You can’t say that about most librarians.

Edit: oops, just noticed which community I’m in. I’m in the USA and I’m not happy about our politics. Sorry to be an ugly American and assume that if your coworkers were anti-union you must be USAian.

That’s a shame. I love my union and see real benefit in being a member.

I was on my Gentoo linux laptop trying to find an open WiFi network on a sidewalk when someone came out of the nearby bank to shoo me away because she was told I was “trying to hack the bank”.

I was just trying SSH into my school account to send an email using PINE to let my parents know my train was 5 hours delayed. This would have been 2005 or so.

Well, I was thinking of moving to Linux full-time anyway now that my Windows install is obsolete. Any reason to avoid this distro? Past experience is with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and SuSE. I mostly game.