Don't allow guests

[ford]

hey guys, quick question: what is the actual purpose of the ai scrapers? like, what are they trying to do? read user posts? steal art?
(also, i'd appreciate it if someone could pm me if they reply haha - i probably won't see otherwise)

from what i understand they're going through pages and scraping text to train ai on, which is very dangerous for writers and roleplayers who post their work on the site as the bots can pick up their writing to throw into the ai database

[♥ mizu]

hey guys, quick question: what is the actual purpose of the ai scrapers? like, what are they trying to do? read user posts? steal art?
(also, i'd appreciate it if someone could pm me if they reply haha - i probably won't see otherwise)

from what i understand they're going through pages and scraping text to train ai on, which is very dangerous for writers and roleplayers who post their work on the site as the bots can pick up their writing to throw into the ai database

ah, that's awful but that's kind of what i suspected. i wish there were a way that we could just like. totally put a stop to it :/

[gardog]

I assumed that there was an increased number of guests this month due to some users having their character references/artworks on here for Art Fight or other art/writing challenges offsite, but, even with that, I've noticed that the guest numbers still hover around ~6,000 or so. I'm glad some fixes can be put in place that don't completely wipe out those who may be too nervous to make an account along with the bots ^^

[FauxFeather]

Thank you, Nick!

[Snowwall]

I have a potential suggestion, why not make it so the creative writing, roleplay, art, and oekaki ar eonly available to logged in users? this will protect art and creative writing from being stolen, at the very least oekaki being log in only to view makes sense

If I understand the forum designations correctly, this will make "Featured drawings" lead to a "You can't see this without being logged in" - which is not a nice thing to do to genuine new users. Or "Featured" will just have to be removed from the front page - which is not a nice thing to do to the users whose pictures got featured!

At least there seem to be less bots lately when I check the forum count. There's only ~600 online RN as opposed to the ~3k I'd see before.

Remember, not all "Unregistered" are "Bots"!

I personally don't think guests are a factor, since they can always just make accounts to lurk with

No, not really.
The prevailing theory of "Everybody can just easily make an account and ditch it if they don't like it" bugs me no end.
My imagination is asleep and can't think up of every single folks' reasons not to make a "lurking" account, but there are a few I know for sure. Just like some people go out of their way to leave no trace in the wilderness (and we're told to emulate them), some people like to not leave traces on websites willy-nilly. Some people believe that making an account or sharing a phone number is an actual investment of goodwill and an opening of metaphorical doors to strangers, not something to be done without a second thought. Some people feel like unused and unclosed accounts are dragging them down and eating up a teeensy bit of their attention, like that backpack that you keep an eye on while eating a sandwich - not a lot, but a bit for the backpack, a bit for the too-big ring that tries to slip off your finger, a bit for the hat that the wind tries to appropriate... and suddenly it all adds up to "How could you possibly miss an elephant trumpeting by? - Not enough free attention left!".
No, not every guest can "just" go and make a lurking account (and boy, am I sometimes envious of the extroverts who can do these things so easily!).

Because passing the bot check requires cookies and JavaScript to be turned on, I've set it up so that logging into your CS account bypasses the bot check for you, so you won't get blocked by those banners when trying to access the creative writing or roleplay forums when logged in with JavaScript disabled.
[...]
As of right now 450,000 bot check pages have been displayed, and only 55 of those visitors passed through the check.

I'm not in the right region to see and test this, but I hope you've made sure that people can log in, ask for help in the "Help" forums, etc, and definitely don't meet the botwall earlier, while trying to log in? It's very frustrating to see "Thou shall not pass, please contact site admin" and be absolutely unable to contact site admin since they are available only on the very website you can't reach. It is also very sad to be classed as "a bot who didn't get through, yay!", when you're actually "a human who couldn't get in, nay..."

Luckily these bots are really bad at what they do, and they spend 90% of their time trapped in the CS Archive anyway, since there are so many links to click there and they end up going in circles.

Heh. The problems of depth-first search algorithms, I remember thee well

[...]so you won't get blocked by those banners when trying to access the creative writing or roleplay forums when logged in with JavaScript disabled.

One of the reasons I adore CS is the fact it works without JavaScript. Glad to see it's by design, not omission. A lot of sites upgrade their JS and things that previously worked suddenly stop. On CS I can still adopt a pet (albeit only 1 at a time ) or use the forums even if my Internet is sketchy and my browser is basic or I'm stuck with an un-upgradeable iPhone 6 and its "what you have is what you have" software. I also can return from a "Oops, you got logged out!" by using the "Back" button and get all the text I had in a textbox, intact, yay! Can't dress up or draw in Oekaki without JS, yeah, but that's far more understandable than some places' refusal to show me three paragraphs of text without 10 MB of scripts run by the latest and greatest of browserkind
Thanks a lot for the backwards compatibility!

And big thanks for choosing something other than Cloudflare for your anti-bot net. I'm not a fan of all those hidden pre-requisites for entering a website, because I often do something the system's creator didn't expect and the pre-requisites stop being "hidden/transparent", becoming "how did you obtain such a roadblock?! what do you mean 'it timeouts', nobody's Internet is that slow!"... However, if it's got to be here, Anubis is better than the system that blocks people with a "your browser is too old, who cares if it could perfectly well show you this fanfic page, go away" and confuses everyone by implying it's testing "connection security" ("https" is about securing connections from prying eyes, a captcha is definitely not!)

[chupacabra!]

it's awesome to hear about the update! and also incredibly funny that they're stuck in the archive, lol

[Wookieinmashoo]

Luckily these bots are really bad at what they do, and they spend 90% of their time trapped in the CS Archive anyway, since there are so many links to click there and they end up going in circles.

That's actually pretty hilarious; they can't even get to the section of the site to even data scrape.

[Isa Novak]

thanks for your hard work man!

[ClarkG23]

[quote="Nick"]They'll still get counted in the guest totals due to the pages they are allowed to access like the index page[/quote]
Thank you Nick!!! :D

[WinterWolf12]

probably a dumb question but what is a AI Scraper?