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larsmosr

That’s so interesting! I know a few of the individuals and really am curious on how they interact/work together. Cool stuff
You project a lot in your life
Content protection and accessibility are in direct conflict with most approaches. Working on making the a11y layer something I handle properly rather than just hoping CSS ordering is enough.
The goal is raising the cost from "curl + cheerio" to "write a custom decoder per site." Most scrapers move on to easier targets.
The breadcrumb approach right now is simple invisible markers, not paraphrase-resistant watermarking. You're right that semantic watermarking that survives LLM rephrasing is the harder and more interesting problem. It's on the radar but not in scope for v1.
Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.3;

Official OpenAI documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Thanks, what phone/browser? I'll fix that.
For content you want public, no.
The TalkBack issue is useful feedback, thank you. I tested with NVDA and VoiceOver but not TalkBack on Android. If light mode is reading individual words instead of a continuous block that's a real bug I want to fix.

On the broader point, I hear you, but I think there's a middle ground. Not all content is public knowledge. Some of it is premium, proprietary, or behind a paywall. The people publishing it should get to decide whether it becomes free training data.

For public knowledge sites this would be the wrong tool entirely. The use case is more like paywalled articles, proprietary product data, or premium content that companies paid to create and don't want scraped into a competitor's training set. obscrd is opt-in per component, not a whole-site lockdown.
The bar for reverse engineering dropped to "paste the HTML into Claude and ask it to decode." That's partly why the v2 roadmap moves toward techniques where the readable text never exists in the DOM at all. Static obfuscation patterns need to keep evolving or they become a one-prompt solve.
You are more than welcome to do so. Please keep in mind the realistic goal is raising the cost of scraping. Most bots use simple HTTP requests, and we make that useless.
Well the information is not to hide, quiet the opposite haha. There is a Demo page
You are not wrong. But the use case I keep seeing is companies with proprietary content they spent real money creating, who don't want it showing up in someone else's training data for free. It's less about bot hunting and more about content owners having a choice.
Font remapping is actually on the v2 roadmap. The reason v1 uses CSS ordering instead is it preserves screen reader access. Tradeoff is it's reversible (as another commenter just showed). Font remapping is stronger but breaks assistive tech. Solving both is the hard problem.
Yep, that works. The data-o attributes are readable in the DOM so you can reverse it with custom code. That's in the threat model. The goal is raising the cost from "curl + cheerio" to "write a custom decoder per site." Most scrapers move on to easier targets.
Copy-paste breaking is intentional for protected content but it's opt-in per component, not whole-site.

On the AI docs concern, fair point. To answer directly: I've confirmed the obfuscation defeats any scraper reading raw HTML via HTTP requests. Whether GPTBot or ClaudeBot use headless browsers internally, I honestly don't know. The README threat model lists headless browsers under "what it does NOT stop" for that reason.

Fair concern. obscrd actually preserves screen reader access. CSS flexbox order is a visual reordering property, so assistive tech follows the visual order and reads the text correctly. Contact components use sr-only spans with clean text and aria-hidden on the obfuscated layer. We target WCAG 2.2 AA compliance.

Happy to have a11y experts poke at it and point out gaps.

Re:Show HN: React components for generating beautiful PDFs on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:29AM (#47350269)
I wanted to check it out but I get Application error on "Try for free"

Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

https://www.obscrd.dev/

Hey HN -- I'm a solo dev. Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing.The core trick: shuffle characters and words in your HTML using a seed, then use CSS (flexbox order, direction: rtl, unicode-bidi) to put them back visually. Browser renders perfectly. textContent returns garbage.On top of that: email/phone RTL obfuscation with...

( Read More... | 39 comments | 14 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Tinder, but for Food on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:53AM (#47346611)
How are the costs calculated? Is it just US based or would you be able to apply this let’s say to germany or thailand?
I‘d love to check this out
Exactly this! There needs to be some sort of reward for the user to keep up with checking in. I imagine something like tamagotchi where you have to feed a pet like creature that also checks in with you/ asks your mood or smth
Re:Show HN: Buildwhat.org – Find tech business ideas on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @12:04PM (#47337376)
Mmh I don’t know, the search needs an update. I couldn’t really find anything with my keywords
Cool tool for Digital Nomads. I live in Chiang Mai right now and I was wondering what would happen if I’d move to Palma de Mallorca. Now I know
Simple and useful. I’d imagine there is potential to extend this for other usecases
Good one! I’ve been ramping up my usage lately because I’ve got so many ideas. To have this is such a game changer
This is one of those projects where the benefits outweighs the risks
Re:Show HN: A modern React onboarding tour library on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @10:20PM (#47331133)
I’m going to look into this even though I need something like this for react-native more urgent.
Re:Show HN: Claude Code Token Elo on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @10:18PM (#47331119)
That’s awesome for competing with my developer friend!

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