• 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.