“This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot,” wrote the bot as it passed an anti-AI screening step.

“This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot,” wrote the bot as it passed an anti-AI screening step.

  • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
    13·
    3 days ago

    Thanks for the write up, but I was blocked from logging in on a cloudflare website because I opened too many windows once and their tracking cookie flagged that browser as a bot.

    Meanwhile the bot I built to track mod updates to my modlist for Rimworld and Mw5 on nexus? Never ran into any issues.

    So when I refer to Cloudflare’s bot detection as shit, that is a highly personal and professional opinion.

      • Midnight_Oil@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        I get it. I really do. Having seen both the sheer volume of bot traffic and the annoyance of CAPTCHA, it’s hard for me to be on one side here. I wish the general public could see the volume of bot traffic we’re all contending with but I also get the the internet just gets shitier and shitier.

    • Midnight_Oil@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      No problem, thanks for reading. I don’t work for Cloudflare, but I worry it’s a little too easy to call something shit when you don’t fully understand it.

      There are numerous factors at play here even outside of frameworks and browsers. I haven’t worked with Cloudflare’s tools but where I work we allow each customer to fine tune detections. One site’s detections might be too aggressive for another site. Believe it or not, some customers are ok with bot traffic so long as it’s not overly aggressive. That said, detections can trigger based on behavior, such as high volumes of requests, as well as IP reputation.

      Even with the bypasses that are available, or instances when you are able to use a bot and not be challenged, it doesn’t diminish how well these tools work. There are reasons people are implementing these types of antibot solutions across the web.