I was reading the reddit thread on Claude AI crawlers effectively DDOSing Linux Mint forums https://libreddit.lunar.icu/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/
and I wanted to block all ai crawlers from my selfhosted stuff.
I don’t trust crawlers to respect the Robots.txt but you can get one here: https://darkvisitors.com/
Since I use Caddy as a Server, I generated a directive that blocks them based on their useragent. The content of the regex basically comes from darkvisitors.
Sidenote - there is a module for blocking crawlers as well, but it seemed overkill for me https://github.com/Xumeiquer/nobots
For anybody who is interested, here is the block_ai_crawlers.conf I wrote.
(blockAiCrawlers) {
  @blockAiCrawlers {
    header_regexp User-Agent "(?i)(Bytespider|CCBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|Google-Extended|GPTBot|omgili|anthropic-ai|Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|cohere-ai)"
  }
  handle @blockAiCrawlers {
    abort
  }
}
# Usage:
# 1. Place this file next to your Caddyfile
# 2. Edit your Caddyfile as in the example below
#
# ```
# import block_ai_crawlers.conf
#
# www.mywebsite.com {
#   import blockAiCrawlers
#   reverse_proxy * localhost:3000
# }
# ```
- I got meaner with them :3c - I just want you to know that was an amazing read, was actually thinking “It gets worse? Oh it does. Oh, IT GETS EVEN WORSE?” - lmao that means a lot, thanks <3 
 
- The nobots module I’ve linked bombs them 
- Suggestion at the end: - <a class="boom" href="https://boom .arielaw.ar">hehe</a>- Wouldn’t it destroy GoogleBot (and other search engine) those making your site delisted from Search? 
- In dark mode, the anchor tags are difficult to read. They’re dark blue on a dark background. Perhaps consider something with a much higher contrast?  - Apart from that, nice idea - I’m going to deploy the zipbomb today! - nice catch, thanks (i use light mode most of the time) 
 
- This is one of the best things I’ve ever read. - I’d love to see a robots.txt do a couple safe listings, then a zip bomb, then a safe listing. It would be fun to see how many log entries from an IP look like get a, get b, get zip bomb… no more requests. 
- I really like your site’s color scheme, fonts, and overall aesthetics. Very nice! - I agree, it’s readable and very cute! 
 
- That’s devilishly and deliciously devious. 
 
- I’m a fan of hellpotting them. - From your recommendation, I found a related project pandoras_pot that I am able to run in a Docker container, and seems to run more efficiently on my Pi home server. I now use it in my Caddyfile to redirect a number of fake subdomains and paths that are likely to be found by a malicious bot (of course all are excluded in my robots.txt for bots that actually respect it). Thanks for the recommendation! 
- Ooh, didn’t know about that one… thanks 
 
- We should do more than block them, they need to be teergrubed. - Thats an easy modification. Just redirect or reverse proxy to the tarpit instead of - abort.- I was even thinking about an infinitely linked data-poisoned html document, but there seemed to be no ready made project that can generate one at the moment. (No published data-poisoning techniques for plain text at all afaik. But there is one for images.) - Ultimately I decided to just abort the connection as I don’t want my servers to waste traffic or CPU cycles. 
- Such a cool person making the video available for download 
- Your link has no article, and Video inside Flash file (swf) that itn’t opening in 2024. - And I don’t want to install Flash on my machine… 
 
- Huh, looks like the post in r/linux got removed for not being relevant. 
 What a joke.






