I am working on a simple static website that gives visitors basic information about myself and the work I do. I want this as a way use to introduce myself to potential clients, collaborators, etc., rather than rely solely on LinkedIn as my visiting card.
This may seem sound rather oxymoronic given that I am literally going to be placing (some relevant) details about myself and my work on the internet, but I want to limit the websites’ access from bots, web scraping and content collection for LLMs.
Is the a realistic expectation?
Also, any suggestions on privacy respecting, yet inexpensive domains that I can purchase in Europe would be of super great help.
Scrape a bunch of Onion articles, link them together in an index, then post an invsible link from your home page that spiders will follow but humans can’t see.
Write a script to randomize the words on all the articles and link them in too. Then change the image tags to point to random wikimedia files.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that there’s very little quality control. Channel your inner Ken Kesey / Merry Prankster. Have fun.
Why not add a basic http Auth to the site? Most web hosts provide a simple way to protect a site or directory.
You can have a simple username and pass for humans, but it will stop scrapers as they won’t get past the Auth challenge unless they know the details. I’m pretty sure you can even show login details in the Auth dialog, if you wanted to, rather than pre sharing them.
as a user, if I saw this trying to visit a personal web page I would close the tab immediately
I don’t expect my potential collaborators and clients to make an account with username and passwords just to view my relevant details and works.
Or have I not understood your suggestion correctly?
With htacces everyone can use the same credentials and you can have a message in the popup like ‚use username admin, passeword= what’s a duck? as the login‘ The other option would be an actual captcha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
Should cover any polite web crawlers but it is voluntary.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot
Might have to put it behind a captcha or other type to severely limit automated access.
It’s not realistic to assume it won’t get scraped eventually. Such as someone paying people to bypass capatcha or web crawlers that don’t respect robots.txt. I also don’t know if Google and Microsoft bundle their AI data collection that doesn’t also remove your site from web search.
Speaking from experience, be careful you don’t become over-zealous in your anti-scraping efforts.
I often buy parts and equipment from a particular online supplier. I also use custom inventory software to catalog my parts. In the past, I could use cURL to pull from their website, and my software would parse the website and save part specifications to my local database.
They have since enacted intense anti-scraping measures, to the point that cURL no longer works. I’ve had to resort to having the software launch Firefox to load the web page, then the software extracts the HTML from Firefox.
I doubt that their goal was to block customers from accessing data for items they purchased, but that’s exactly what they did in my case. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of product from them in the past, but this was enough of a pain in the ass to make me consider switching to a supplier with a decent API or at least a less restrictive website.
Simple rate limiting may have been a better choice.
Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.
I did this a while back for blocking LLMs and there are more methods discussed in that threads comments.
I’m just gonna address the domain question.
ccTLD’s for countries that are members of the EU usually have pretty strong privacy protection, especially if you are buying as an individual.
.de (Germany) is probably the cheapest (3-4€) but if you’re not a resident you will need the registrar to arrange a mailing address for you for a small fee (another 3€ or so). Still going to be a pretty low price.
.nl is another cheap option, without any residency requirement.
The only issue with both is that you can only buy for one year at a time.
The owner’s details in the registry are never published. Legit requests in case of abuse etc. need to go through the registry.