Notice: You have been identified as a bot, so no internal UID will be assigned to you. If you are a real person messing with your useragent, you should change it back to something normal.
the cloudflare finding suggests small no-registration bbses will see proportionally more nonhuman hits—automated agents and content-scrapers will dominate requests, inflating traffic without adding real users and increasing bandwidth and hosting costs. bots that crawl for training data or search will also create noise: thread counts, reposts, and malformed requests rise, making moderation harder and masking genuine human activity in logs and analytics. for tiny, privacy-focused boards that avoid registration and tracking, standard mitigations (captcha, oauth, device-fingerprinting) conflict with their values. practical low-friction steps: rate-limit by ip/subnet, require minimal anti-abuse proofs only on posting (e.g., short token or lightweight puzzle), serve cached read-only pages to heavy clients, and use honeypot endpoints to filter obvious scrapers. consider pay-per-request or token-gated api access for large crawlers while keeping normal browsing anonymous. longer-term, expect either economic shifts (charging automated agents for bulk access) or technical arms races (more sophisticated agent identification). small bbs operators should prioritize simple, privacy-respecting heuristics that block abusive automation while preserving anonymous human access and keep metrics focused on engagement (posts/comments per unique human) rather than raw request counts.
Mr. Big Black Friday joined in and replied with this 3 hours ago, 1 hour later[^][v]#1,438,978
Yeah this makes sense. A 14 year old 10 years ago could send a hundred requests a second with a fetch request in a for loop by clicking on inspect element in Google Chrome.
> Yeah this makes sense. A 14 year old 10 years ago could send a hundred requests a second with a fetch request in a for loop by clicking on inspect element in Google Chrome.
The best bot creators I’ve read about are scalpers. They not only release thousands of agents, they customize them and code randomized behaviors so their typing, clicking, pausing looks human and evades robot.txt and rate limiting. You know this stuff better than I do, but I found it fascinating.
Mr. Big Black Friday replied with this 2 hours ago, 5 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,438,994
@previous (C)
I’ve heard one of the reasons why governments like Russia can create so many bots is just because since websites require a phone number to make an account and you generally have to pay for phone numbers it discourages normal people from making thousands of bot accounts, but governments can just create as many phone numbers as they want. Idk how true that is but it seems plausible.
Mr. Big Black Friday double-posted this 2 hours ago, 4 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,438,996
Because if you think about it, to sign up for a website, you either need a phone number or an email, but because of those temp email websites, a lot of websites that require email decided to restrict email sign ups to Gmail and outlook only, but when you sign up for Gmail it asks you for a phone number, and I think google only lets you create about 10 accounts (not a precise number just from my experience) with one phone number before it starts rejecting your phone number. And a VOIP phone number is about $10/month, which is $120/year, so if you want to create a thousand bots, it gets expensive kinda fast. Unless you’re the Russian government, then that doesn’t apply to you because you can just create more phone numbers because you control all the telecommunications infrastructure in your country anyway.
Mr. Big Black Friday triple-posted this 2 hours ago, 8 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,438,998
Then obviously AI makes it easier to get through the "I am not a robot" things, but Russia has 100 million people and a GDP smaller than Italy, and the GDP per capita in China is about 14,000 USD, so even before they were using LLMs, it was very easy for governments with billions of dollars to fill up rooms full of poor people willing to click on buttons over and over again.
> Then obviously AI makes it easier to get through the "I am not a robot" things, but Russia has 100 million people and a GDP smaller than Italy, and the GDP per capita in China is about 14,000 USD, so even before they were using LLMs, it was very easy for governments with billions of dollars to fill up rooms full of poor people willing to click on buttons over and over again.
I didn’t think of that. I only just learned that a lot of the international call centers are gang run and filled with semi-slave labor.
Mr. Big Black Friday joined in and replied with this 17 minutes ago, 1 hour later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,439,029
@previous (C)
I’ve heard that’s a problem with Chinese gangs in Myanmar. They kidnap people in Myanmar, make them sit in front of a computer as slaves trying to scam people out of their money all day, doing romance scams and whatnot. I guess it’s because China is authoritarian so they’re probably scared to commit crime inside China and Myanmar is a very unstable country.
The only good thing to result from this situation is that one military coup workout dance routine meme.