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 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?

> 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; [email protected])"

- "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.

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.

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.

> 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'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?

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

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.

> 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 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.