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A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems


You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately whatever you're using to do so has a HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious.

Unfortunately whatever you're using to do so has a HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this. To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this.

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Photo of Proof

Proof

Photo of Work

Work

Photo of javascript

javascript

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