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A comment on Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog.

Re:Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted... by nkurz on Thursday December 18, 2025 @09:41PM (#46321741)
I was told by the admin of one forum site I use that the vast majority of the AI scraping traffic is Chinese at this point. Not hidden or proxied, but straight from China. Can anyone else confirm this?

Anyway, if it is true, and assuming a forum with minimal genuine Chinese traffic, might a simple approach that injects the porn links only into IP's accessing from China work?

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Re:Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted... by dspillett on Thursday December 18, 2025 @10:13PM (#46321914)
That would only affect those calling out directly. Many scrapers operate through a battery of proxies so will be hidden by such a simple test.

If your goal is to be blocked by China's great firewall, including mention of tank man and the Tiananmen Square massacre more generally, and certain pooh bear related imagery, might help.

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Re:Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted... by nkurz on Thursday December 18, 2025 @10:33PM (#46322022)
> That would only affect those calling out directly. Many scrapers operate through a battery of proxies so will be hidden by such a simple test.

That was my first question also, and had been my belief. The admin in question was very clear that the IP's were simply originating from China. I'm still surprised, and welcome better general data, but I trust him on this for the site in question.

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Re:Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted... by n1xis10t on Thursday December 18, 2025 @09:44PM (#46321753)
Maybe. This comment makes me really want to set something up that builds a map of where all the requests are coming from.
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Re:Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted... by s0laster on Friday December 19, 2025 @09:24AM (#46326165)
Mostly yes. One of my low-traffic, niche website used to serve 3k true users per month mainly from the US and East EU. Now China alone is 500k users, were each session last no more than a few seconds [1].

[1]: https://ibb.co/20QD6Lnk

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