Super sad.
I've observed only one of them do this with high confidence.
> how are they determining it's the same bot?
it's fairly easy to determine that it's the same bot, because as soon as I blocked the "official" one, a bunch of AWS IPs started crawling the same URL patterns - in this case, mediawiki's diff view (`/wiki/index.php?title=[page]&diff=[new-id]&oldid=[old-id]`), that absolutely no bot ever crawled before.
> What non-bot UA do they claim?
Latest Chrome on Windows.
Since when do we ask people to guess other people's intent when they have better things to show, which is called evidence?
Surely we should talk about things with substantiated matter?
There’s evidence the statement was false, no evidence it was a lie.
> Oh, and of course, they don't just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don't give a single flying fuck about robots.txt, because why should they.
Their self righteous indignation and specificity of the pretend subject of that indignation precludes any doubt about intent.
This guy made a whole public statement that is verifiably false. And then tried to toddler logic it away when he got called out.
The author responded:
>denschub 2 days ago [–]
>the robots.txt on the wiki is no longer what it was when the bot accessed it. primarily because I clean up my stuff afterwards, and the history is now completely inaccessible to non-authenticated users, so there's no need to maintain my custom robots.txt
Which is verifiably untrue:
HTTP/1.1 200 server: nginx/1.27.2 date: Tue, 10 Dec 2024 13:37:20 GMT content-type: text/plain last-modified: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 18:52:00 GMT etag: W/"1c-62204b7e88e25" alt-svc: h3=":443", h2=":443" X-Crawler-content-encoding: gzip Content-Length: 28
User-agent: * Disallow: /w/
There are no “intentional” lies, because there are no “unintentional” lies.
All lies are intentional. An “unintentional lie” is better known as “being wrong”.
Being wrong isn’t always lying. What’s so hard about this? An example:
My wife once asked me if I had taken the trash out to the curb, and I said I had. This was demonstrably false, anyone could see I had not. Yet for whatever reason, I mistakenly believed that I had done it. I did not lie to her. I really believed I had done it. I was wrong.
Your accusation was directly addressed by the author in a comment on the original post, IIRC
i find your attitude as expressed here to be problematic in many ways
For convenience, you can view the extracted data here:
You are welcome to verify for yourself by searching for “wiki.diasporafoundation.org/robots.txt” in the CommonCrawl index here:
https://index.commoncrawl.org/
The index contains a file name that you can append to the CommonCrawl url to download the archive and view.
More detailed information on downloading archives here:
https://commoncrawl.org/get-started
From September to December, the robots.txt at wiki.diasporafoundation.org contained this, and only this:
>User-agent: * >Disallow: /w/
Apologies for my attitude, I find defenders of the dishonest in the face of clear evidence even more problematic.
If you are legitimately trying to correct misinformation, your attitude, tone and language are counter productive. You would be much better seved by taking that energy and crafting an actually persuasive argument. You come across as unreasonable and unwilling to listen, not someone with a good grasp of the technical specifics.
I don't have a horse in the race. I'm fairly technical, but I did not find your arguments persuasive. This doesn't mean they are wrong, but it does mean that you didn't do a good job of explaining them.
These bots were crushing our search infrastructure (which is tightly coupled to our front end).
"If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet."