• Onno (VK6FLAB)English
    31•1 month ago

    The robots.txt construct is completely voluntary and some bots use it to specially target content.

    In my opinion, anyone relying on this to protect their content has no business publishing anything online.

    See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

    • neo [he/him]OPEnglish
      10•1 month ago

      Of course it’s voluntary, but if entities like OpenAI say they will respect it then presumably they really will.

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)English
        18•1 month ago

        Couple of things:

        1. Do you believe anything coming out of OpenAI when it’s abundantly clear that they’ll say anything to protect their bottom line.
        2. OpenAI are not the only people harvesting data and selling it to interested parties.
        3. There is no legal requirement to adhere to the standard and I’d be shocked if any court in the USA could understand the issue, let alone enforce a voluntary standard.
        4. The amount of automated data collection online is staggering. On my own services it accounts for 50% of the hits. Good luck with policing that.
        • neo [he/him]OPEnglish
          7•1 month ago

          I agree with your points 2-4 but I have observed on my own website that the crawlers who don’t respect won’t, and the crawlers who do respect will.

          • the_itsb [she/her, comrade/them]English
            6•1 month ago

            How did you find this information? I know how to check traffic for my website, but idk how to get from “list of IPs” to “these ones are crawlers”

            apologies if this is a silly question

            • neo [he/him]OPEnglish
              2•1 month ago

              I used to sit and monitor my server access logs. You can tell by the access patterns. Many of the well-behaved bots announce themselves in their user agents, so you can see when they’re on. I could see them crawl the main body of my website, but not go to a subdomain, which is clearly linked from the homepage but is disallowed from my robots.txt.

              On the other hand, spammy bots that are trying to attack you will often instead have access patterns that try to probe your website for common configurations for common CMSes like WordPress. They don’t tend to crawl.

              Google also provides a tool to test robots.txt, for example.

      • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]English
        11•1 month ago

        presumably they really will

        but why presume that the guys trying to scam people by claiming their algorithms are aRtIfIcIaL iNtElLiGeNcE aren’t lying about that?

      • space_comrade [he/him]English
        4•1 month ago

        but if entities like OpenAI say they will respect it then presumably they really will.

        Eh, will they really? It’d be pretty hard to prove they didn’t respect it.

    • CarbonScored [any]English
      3•1 month ago

      It’s not about relying on it, it’s about changing the behaviour of web crawlers that respect 'em, which, as someone who has adminned a couple scarily popular sites over the years, is a surprisingly high percentage of them.

      If someone wants to get around it, they obviously can, but this is true of basically all protective measures ever. Doesn’t make them pointless.