I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I feel like the only even remotely acceptable way to do this is to show the ad, prompt for the answer for 10 seconds. They can log the right/wrong answer or if the time expires the lack of one and must move on.

    I can imagine metrics knowing if your advertising is actually reaching people is valid. But to make people answer and especially make them watch more if they answer wrong is about as dystopian as it gets.

    If (and I say if, I really don’t want to believe it is) that is the case, the only correct response is to uninstall Hulu immediately and put on your pirate hat.


  • For threadiverse (lemmy/mbin et al) there’s not much in it. It’s fairly easy for an operator to curate their instance by pre subscribing to a whole bunch of communities. I run my own instance, barely any users and I’m constantly banning and deleting them for advertising. But I have plenty of content.

    I made my own mastodon instance and connected to a bunch of groups. Only two or three are active. There’s not really an easy way to get content without following a lot of people. So anyone visiting my instance will see virtually nothing. If they go to social they will see plenty.

    So it’s a bit of a no brainer for most I think.



  • Why? Because you can. But in terms of useful reasons?

    Cellphones, Internet they need infrastructure to work, and that can be disabled either during a natural disaster or war situation. Even by your own government in some cases.

    But if I want to communicate, I just need a piece of wire, somewhere to hang it, and a 12v battery and I can communicate for thousands of miles.

    Personally I just think that’s cool.





  • The problem I see in trying to implement it using AP is that a node on an AP network knows nothing about other nodes by default. Whereas a dating site wants to match people with as many other likely partners from the pool available. These two features aren’t really compatible.

    You’d need some kind of “master list” of instances, which isn’t really how AP decentralisation is meant to work.

    e.g. lemmy/?bin. A new instance knows nothing about other instances when first setup. It works like a standalone forum. However a user, if they know a community name and instance name, they can search for that combined value and their instance subscribes to the remote instance. After that they will receive all new content for that community.

    So it’s a subscription based system.



  • So on my mbin instance, it’s on cloudflare. So I filter the AS numbers there. Don’t even reach my server.

    On the sites that aren’t behind cloudflare. Yep it’s on the nginx level. I did consider firewall level. Maybe just make a specific chain for it. But since I was blocking at the nginx level I just did it there for now. I mean it keeps them off the content, but yes it does tell them there’s a website there to leech if they change their tactics for example.

    You need to block the whole ASN too. Those that are using chrome/firefox UAs change IP every 5 minutes from a random other one in their huuuuuge pools.


  • Yeah, I probably should look to see if there’s any good plugins that do this on some community submission basis. Because yes, it’s a pain to keep up with whatever trick they’re doing next.

    And unlike web crawlers that generally check a url here and there, AI bots absolutely rip through your sites like something rabid.


  • If you’re running nginx I am using the following:

    if ($http_user_agent ~* "SemrushBot|Semrush|AhrefsBot|MJ12bot|YandexBot|YandexImages|MegaIndex.ru|BLEXbot|BLEXBot|ZoominfoBot|YaK|VelenPublicWebCrawler|SentiBot|Vagabondo|SEOkicks|SEOkicks-Robot|mtbot/1.1.0i|SeznamBot|DotBot|Cliqzbot|coccocbot|python|Scrap|SiteCheck-sitecrawl|MauiBot|Java|GumGum|Clickagy|AspiegelBot|Yandex|TkBot|CCBot|Qwantify|MBCrawler|serpstatbot|AwarioSmartBot|Semantici|ScholarBot|proximic|GrapeshotCrawler|IAScrawler|linkdexbot|contxbot|PlurkBot|PaperLiBot|BomboraBot|Leikibot|weborama-fetcher|NTENTbot|Screaming Frog SEO Spider|admantx-usaspb|Eyeotabot|VoluumDSP-content-bot|SirdataBot|adbeat_bot|TTD-Content|admantx|Nimbostratus-Bot|Mail.RU_Bot|Quantcastboti|Onespot-ScraperBot|Taboolabot|Baidu|Jobboerse|VoilaBot|Sogou|Jyxobot|Exabot|ZGrab|Proximi|Sosospider|Accoona|aiHitBot|Genieo|BecomeBot|ConveraCrawler|NerdyBot|OutclicksBot|findlinks|JikeSpider|Gigabot|CatchBot|Huaweisymantecspider|Offline Explorer|SiteSnagger|TeleportPro|WebCopier|WebReaper|WebStripper|WebZIP|Xaldon_WebSpider|BackDoorBot|AITCSRoboti|Arachnophilia|BackRub|BlowFishi|perl|CherryPicker|CyberSpyder|EmailCollector|Foobot|GetURL|httplib|HTTrack|LinkScan|Openbot|Snooper|SuperBot|URLSpiderPro|MAZBot|EchoboxBot|SerendeputyBot|LivelapBot|linkfluence.com|TweetmemeBot|LinkisBot|CrowdTanglebot|ClaudeBot|Bytespider|ImagesiftBot|Barkrowler|DataForSeoBo|Amazonbot|facebookexternalhit|meta-externalagent|FriendlyCrawler|GoogleOther|PetalBot|Applebot") { return 403; }

    That will block those that actually use recognisable user agents. I add any I find as I go on. It will catch a lot!

    I also have a huuuuuge IP based block list (generated by adding all ranges returned from looking up the following AS numbers):

    AS45102 (Alibaba cloud) AS136907 (Huawei SG) AS132203 (Tencent) AS32934 (Facebook)

    Since these guys run or have run bots that impersonate real browser agents.

    There are various tools online to return prefix/ip lists for an autonomous system number.

    I put both into a single file and include it into my web site config files.

    EDIT: Just to add, keeping on top of this is a full time job! EDIT 2: Removed Mojeek bot as it seems to be a normal web crawler.