But the bots are not a problem if you're doing proper caching and throttling.
I mean, if your site has more bots than actual users, maybe you're doing it wrong. If what looks like a static page requires a captcha, you're doing something wrong. If it takes you $1 to generate a page, so you have to make sure all your visitors waste $1 of their time to view it, you're doing something wrong. Yes, captchas are a symptom, but it's a symptom of incompetence, not of bots. Bots don't cause captchas, poor engineering does. Bots aren't a problem, captchas are. C. On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 21:16, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]> wrote: > > The problem is the bots. > > The captchas are just a symptom. > > Josh Reynolds > Chief Technology Officer | SPITwSPOTS > > On Tue, Jul 1, 2025, 9:04 PM Constantine A. Murenin via NANOG > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 09:15, Brandon Butterworth via NANOG >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> > On 01/07/2025 15:05:16, "Johannes Müller Aguilar via NANOG" >> > <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >For about a month, users behind IP addresses we announce have been >> > >prompted to solve captchas when accessing Cloudflare-proxied sites. >> > >> > I've seen that increase and now regularly get it on home >> > broadband services, others have reported this too. I suspect >> > many are getting it and assumed this is the new normal. >> >> I'm seeing this on StackOverflow / StackExchange on my home broadband as >> well. >> >> Having to wait half a minute to glance at a search result completely >> ruins the use-case for said result. If your time is worth $120/h, >> that's a $1 for each StackOverflow visit just to open the page, >> obviously it's cheaper to use AI at that point, so, no idea what >> they're thinking killing their own market. >> >> I wish Google Search would let people blacklist StackOverflow as long >> as they're a Cloudflare user; or, heck, anything with these captchas. >> It's effectively just search spam with all those captchas. >> >> But the "best" part about the security industry, is that because I do >> close the window in less than a second, Cloudflare probably reports my >> visit attempt as saving StackOverflow from yet another bot! "Look how >> many bots we've saved you from!" >> >> I'd like to see the metrics from Cloudflare and the other captcha >> vendors on how they justify wasting billions of dollars in lost >> productivity. It probably costs way-way-way-way less than $0.01 to >> serve a page for which the legitimate users must now waste $1 in lost >> income. There's probably a 10000x amplification factor for real users >> wasting resources compared to how much resources are saved from the >> most basic bots that can't get through, bravo! All for what? >> >> Did anyone think of the environment, how much computing resources are >> wasted by everyone proving that they're not a bot? >> >> C. >> _______________________________________________ >> NANOG mailing list >> https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/ROWRSJDJKROFAH54DJ3ATVMTG4JTQGFL/ _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/RGRSNRSEEBKFWHDTVK62F2TIBFBLWALI/
