We enabled a new Cloudflare feature on FA that automatically blocks AI bot scrapers.
Hell, at one point Tiktok's parent company Bytedance once hit us with so many bots it knocked our site offline temporarily. Fuck AI. You are hurting independent sites, you hemorrhaging shitgibbons.
Had this same problem with one of the railfan sites I help run. ChatGPT and a couple other "AI" bots were crawling us at a rate at that was literally crippling the site. We ended up just blocking all of them.
Yeah, it's a legitimate problem. It takes up resources, can cause outages, blips, interruptions, and in some cases even increased costs.
Websites have finite resources, and these giant companies seem to have no issues attacking smaller ones for their own personal gain. It's disgusting.
