Even more tweaks

In my continued war against the AI robots, I have been pleased to see one element of the Cloudfare service becoming well worth the effort of connecting with it: The "AI Labyrinth."

For a while I was getting annoyed at the fact that certain bots that I had successfully prevented from accessing stuff here had, according to my standard traffic logs, come back after linking up with Cloudflare. That's the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish, after all. But I did a bit of cross-referencing with all the new data and found that while, yes, those bots were being allowed back in, they were lured in only to be hooked by a sneaky line and pulled into a trap off-site. The labyrinth is a swarm of nonsense and links to garbage designed to keep the scraper bots busy scarfing up completely useless crap while they go in circles, thus wasting their resources. Karma, you bot bastards!

It took a little while for the labyrinth to kick in on this site, as it's relatively puny and not heavily trafficked. But I implemented it elsewhere on a couple other sites today and damned if it didn't start kicking in within an hour. Those poor saps were being inundated and it took no time at all for the lures to get bites.

I had (very) briefly considered setting up my own bot trap, but aside from inflicting annoyance on the bot operators, it wouldn't help; hosting a bot trap is self-defeating as it by design consumes a lot of bandwidth. So I'm happy to be using someone else's likely far more effective one.

So, positive developments on that front.

Not so positive on the RSS feed/email subscription front, though; having had to leave the perfectly fine email program I'd been using because Cloudfare screwed with it, I now have a digest email thing going via "mailer lite." It is playing very nicely with all the security tweaks here, so that's good. It also sent out a duplicate email today, which is not good. That's annoying and starts to get into spam territory, which is no good to anyone. (Apologies to those of you who received it.) I would recommend using the feedrabbit service I mentioned on Sunday, but after making the necessary DNS changes to accommodate Cloudfare, feedrabbit was hit with the entire RSS feed of the site going back years and went a little bananas with its emails. That triggered an anti-spam thing that made it too switch to only sending out a daily digest rather than an update whenever there's a new post. So... oops.

I'm working on making this new thing work the way it's supposed to and not send duplicate mail. Your patience is appreciated.

Meanwhile, as always, I recommend setting up your own RSS feed reader or browser plugin or Outlook folder or whathaveyou to follow not just this site but any others you like. Then you won't need to sign up here. But I know people won't do that, so I plod on with the email thing.